A new study has emerged that shows the key U.S. Digital Marketing Trends for 2008. It’s web site traffic numbers clearly reflect the events of last year with recession and political related topics gaining rank. The report highlights key trends in several areas of digital marketing, including e-commerce, top-growing sites and site categories, search, online video, online advertising and mobile.
Recession related topics
The job search category ranked as the top-gaining site category for the year, up 51 percent to nearly 19 million visitors in December 2008. With layoffs occurring, workers are clearly looking for alternative jobs or looking for new jobs if made redundant.
Though not reported on, we may well see an increase in people looking to obtain a second job or part-time job.
Coupons was another growth area and is probably related to family cost cutting measures during this hard economic time.
Politics
Of course being an election year, political websites saw increased traffic, up 43 percent to 12 million visitors. U.S. Internet users viewed a total of 4.5 trillion display ads including political ads during the past twelve months, with the average person viewing more than 2,000 ads per month.
The average person is probably not actually viewing more than 2,000 ads per month but rather that is the number that is displayed on web pages. The problem of ad blindness (where the viewer no longer notices the ads) on web pages has become an issue as people tend to automatically and subconsciously screen out any ads on a page.
Search engine volume
Search engine volume continued to grow across all search engines but Google accounted for 90% of that growth.
There are plenty more interesting facts in this report and you can get your own copy below
