The best digital marketing stats we’ve seen this week

We’ve got news about Amazon earnings, influencer bots, customer service preferences and lots more. Don’t forget to give the Internet Statistics Compendium a look-see too.

Let’s get going.

Amazon posts record $2.5bn profit for Q2

Amazon has posted a record profit of $2.5bn for the second quarter of 2018, having doubled analysts’ expectations.

Revenue grew 39% year-on-year to reach $52.89bn. While this was less than analysts’ predictions, favourable profit results (almost 12 times higher than this time last year) ensured Amazon shares were up 3% in after hours trading.

This quarter’s success has been partly attributed to growth in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing division, as well as improving margins in online retail.

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73% of consumers would move to a competitor if a website is slow to load

In a survey of 3,200 adults from the UK and US, Eggplant found that businesses with a slow or underperforming website are likely to lose 73% of customers to a competitor.

70% of UK adults surveyed rated website speed as important when it comes to online activity. Out of this 70%, 33% said website speed was very important, while just 2% of the overall said speed was not important at all.

Interestingly, website speed is so important that 60% said they feel much more negative to a brand if its site is consistently slow to load. Meanwhile, 23% said they feel the same way if a site is down or not working.

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12% of UK influencers appear to have bought fake followers in the past six months

A study into influencer marketing by CampaignDeus has revealed that 12% of UK influencers show signs of having bought fake Instagram followers in the past six months. This comes from the analysis of 700,000 influencer posts published on Instagram from 4,600 accounts.

The key giveaway for this is UK-based influencers with a very low proportion of their audience based in the UK, unexplained leaps in follower counts, and low engagement rates.

The study also found that influencers with under 100,000 followers achieve an average of 60% higher engagement rates for branded posts compared to those with more than 100,000 followers. The best performing tend to be micro Fashion & Style influencers, with macro Fitness performing the least well.

Lastly, 34% of branded posts on Instagram are for Fashion & Style brands, while 23% are for Beauty. The next largest sector is Food & Drink, with 16% of all Instagram branded posts in this sector. Altogether, these three sectors make up 70% of the entire brand sponsored influencer market.

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Kylie Jenner tops Instagram Rich List

HopperHQ has revealed the highest earning celebrities and influencers currently on Instagram.

Kylie Jenner (who was fourth on the list last year) has risen to number one, with 110 million followers and earnings of $1 million per post.

Selena Gomez (who was number one last year) has dropped to second, with 138 million followers and earning $800,000 per post. Cristiano Ronaldo, with 133 million followers, and $750,000 per post is third.

Check out the full list here.

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Customers value simple service over technology

62% of customers want simple and flexible customer service options rather than new technology. This is according to a new report from Engine, which stems from a survey of over 1000 UK consumers.

It found that customers value simplicity rather than fancy tech, with only 15% of survey respondents saying that businesses should invest in technology like voice assistants. In contrast, 58% of respondents suggested that businesses should provide better ‘training and performance incentives for customer-facing staff’.

The report also states that 68% of customers recommend services to friends based on the quality of service rather than convenience and price. Meanwhile, Amazon was named the top business for providing the best customer experience and service for the second year running.

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Visits to Amazon on Prime Day increased 10.3% YoY

Despite the fact that Amazon crashed on Prime Day, data has revealed that it was the biggest in the site’s history.

According to Hitwise, visits to Amazon across Prime Day increased 10.3% compared to last year, with a total of 89 million people visiting the site in the UK. Taking into account searches across Google, Bing, and other search platforms, it also found that one in every twenty UK web visits went to amazon.co.uk on July 16th.

Meanwhile, Hitwise has revealed that nearly seven million transactions took place – a rise of 654,000 on last year. 7.8% of all visitors also went on to purchase something on the site after browsing – up 10.4% on 2017.

The Amazon Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot were the top purchases during Prime Day, with conversion rates of 18% and 11% respectively – double the amount on the week before.

73% of consumers say email is their preferred marketing channel post-GDPR

Despite industry concerns about the effect of GDPR, research from the DMA suggests that consumers still prefer email as a marketing channel above any other. In a survey of 2,016 consumers, 73% of respondents stated that email is their preferred marketing channel out of a total of eight.

This is good news for marketers. Econsultancy’s Email Marketing Census, in association with Adestra, found email to be the most highly rated marketing channel amongst marketers for return on investment, with nearly 74% of client-side marketers rating it as either ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ in this context.

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