Last week saw the release of Mary Meeker’s 2018 Internet Trends Report.
The annual update on the state of the internet, our online habits, tech, ecommerce and much more, has become essential reading, charting the trends which provide insights into future developments, opportunities and threats.
We’ve pulled together our most interesting takeaways for search and ecommerce below.
Internet and social media: Global penetration continues to grow with rising and cheaper connectivity, and more data sharing.
Mobile: We’re spending more time online; mobile is the biggest slice of that and growing.
Advertising: There’s an opportunity in mobile advertising as we continue to spend more time on smartphones.
Mobile video: Adoption continues to grow, underlining video as one of the key forms of content to include in your content marketing.
Voice: It’s all about AI as Google’s machine learning word accuracy reaches the threshold for human accuracy...
… and voice-activated personal assistants enter the mainstream.
Product discovery: Amazon is the first port of call for almost 50% of searches.
Amazon and Google: In addition to product discovery, buying paths show the threat Amazon poses to Google. Amazon keeps the whole process from product search to fulfillment in-house, while Google sends users to 3rd parties.
Social media: Continues to be a driver for product discovery and purchases, with 55% buying a product online after discovering on social media.
Local: Data driven personalization is also on the up. ‘Near me’ queries grew by 900% in the period 2015-17, underlining the importance of optimizing for local search.
Privacy: Data improves the predictive ability of many services, but data sharing creates challenges. People are protective of their privacy when the benefits are not clear.
China: Remains the one to watch with a whole section devoted to it in the report. Chinese ecommerce platform Alibaba is “fast becoming the leading retail infrastructure in China” and expanding rapidly further afield.
Download the whole report here.
