As consumers now live online with their smartphones rarely more than a metre away from their hands, search, video and app usage continues to accelerate and evolve. In this environment, brands have the chance to take advantage of more audience signals than ever before. Google’s Eileen Naughton says it’s essential that marketers rethink how they communicate with consumers to make the most of the opportunity to win the moments that matter.
Although it’s only been eight years since the first smartphone came out, today it is a fixture in the hands of 2.8 billion people around the world. People now spend more time on mobile devices than they do on computers. In the UK, we’ve passed that threshold with more than 50% of YouTube views taking place on mobile. And there’s no going back – today 71%1 of the UK population owns a smartphone. Projections for the UK’s ad spend forecasts mobile to be the third largest platform for advertising after internet and TV.2
Mobile is a behaviour; we should stop thinking of it as a device. It allows people to be more spontaneous and opportunistic; we engage in smaller bursts of digital activity throughout the day. For brands, this provides hugely valuable signals. The global population checks a smartphone more than 100 billion times a day.3 That’s 100 billion moments to understand consumers and reach out to them. Behaviours are the signals consumers leave all over the web. At Google, we see them at massive scale and with precision.
Humans have always searched for the essentials of life – food, water and shelter – as well as the existentials – music, poetry and love. What’s different now is the observable scale of search behaviours. In everyday moments, our search behaviour tells quite a lot. At Google, we’re really focused on interpreting signals across devices, identifying the purchase path and attributing value across screens and touchpoints. For example, almost a third of people in the UK turn to a device for information or inspiration as an immediate response to a TV show or commercial,4 so now you can add your TV spots to Google Analytics to see how your marketing mix works together.
Meanwhile, apps have become an essential part of daily life. They enable and enhance customer interaction as we move seamlessly between screens. People are spending on average 30 hours per month inside apps,5 and 47% of people in the UK say they turn to an app when they need information quickly as opposed to 17% who prefer to use a mobile website.6
In the Google suite of products, one of our most popular apps is YouTube, where more than 4 million videos per day are viewed on mobile. It is an eminently powerful search engine in its own right and provides a huge corpus of data; marketers are increasingly turning to YouTube to interact with consumers.
What happens when you integrate signals across mobile, video and search? You can create a better understanding of what people do and what they want. Programmatic buying allows us to target consumers very precisely based on a collection of observed behavioural data from the last 30 days across the web.
Just imagine the precision with which you can serve creative messaging with that kind of intelligence delivering that kind of relevance to the exact and appropriate audience you want to reach. Google is about understanding behaviours at scale. We can help you know a lot about your audiences – what people do, when, where and on what device. We have access to these signals across all these moments and touchpoints. The more that you understand these signals, the more you will win the moments that matter for your brands with your customers.
Watch the presentation below to hear more:
