The latest figures for e-commerce activity in the UK (and against the rest of the World) show a slight decrease in the rate of growth, but still a big increase year on year. The last quarter of 2011 shows an increase of 14% on the previous year, quarter 4 2010. The main movement of note is where the clicks are driven from; eventually ending up as website sales.
The distribution of clicks took a swing towards mobile during 2011 and into 2012. In the last 2 years the number of mobile ad impressions has multiplied by over 1000. See below the number of ad impressions during the quarters between October 2009 until September 2011, follow the green bars for European trends.
Google again continues to dominate the search engine scene in the UK. The figures for Europe show a similar result, over 80% of clicks and over 80% of all online spend originated from the US based company.
Looking at the emerging generation in isolation, almost 4 from every 10 college students buy more online than in-store. This indicates a possible 50-50 split between high street and e-commerce sales in the coming years. Some of the emerging super-economies have interesting figures for online purchases - notably Brazil having 66% of students buying more on the Internet. China is close behind with 60% online, Germany Spain and the UK all around 50% or more. Maybe in correlation to internet usage, Russia is unusually low at just 11% choosing to shop online from the youngest generation of the purchasing public.
Thinking about conversions - many e-commerce managers spend most of their time trying to convert traffic to sales, and conversions are a key aspect of email marketing too. Desktop PC users are traditionally online during weekdays, with web-mail and mobile emails viewed much more on weekends. See the swing in email views by type of device.
The overall picture has changed dramatically in recent times when it comes to how we collect and view emails. Webmail has reduced slightly but desktop has taken a big hit - with 23% of all emails now viewed from a mobile device or smart phone.
