Top of the Charts: Our most popular blog posts of 2015

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The crème de la crème of 2015’s digital marketing advice

2015 has been a busy year for digital marketers, as I’m sure anyone working in the industry will agree. There have been plenty of major changes by the top digital marketing platforms. Facebook throttled its organic reach but created lots of new features for business pages. Google introduced a series of algorithm changes, including the infamous Mobile-friendly updated dubbed ‘Mobilegeddon’ and Twitter stopped sharing of Tweet counts and changed its favourite button to a like feature.

Throughout the year we’ve been blogging to keep you “in the loop” about the latest changes and provide you with advice on strategy, planning and implementation of the latest digital marketing techniques. Now that 2015 is drawing to a close, we thought we’d review the top 10 blogs of the year that received the most traffic from our readers.

1

Coming in at the top of the charts is our regularly updated compilation of mobile marketing stats. It’s hardly surprising since marketers have seen consumers and businesses shifting to business and want to justify their investments in mobile marketing. This was the year the mobile tipping point was passed and mobile devices accounted for more traffic than desktop for the first time ever. A big moment in the history of digital!

2 Display advertising click through rates

At second place is our compilation of display ad CTRs, designed to help marketers and students studying interactive marketing with a benchmark of ad response.

Social media ads are now established as a mainstay of online advertising. We also included a a comparison of CTRs for Facebook and Twitter that shows how social media ads has evolved across different platforms.

3 Email Marketing statistics 2015

Coming it at 3rd we have a seriously useful resource for email marketers. Emai marketers are always on the look out for statistics to compare subscriber engagement for open, clickthrough and delivery rates, ideally within their sector. Our August 2015 update gives stats by sector for small and medium size businesses, while the post as a whole gives a series of stats to benchmark your email campaigns across US, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia.

The post also provides The latest Litmus compilation of email client market share from February 2015, which shows why it’s so important to consider how well your emails render on mobile. It’s based on the percentage of opens on different platforms. The uptick in webmail opens is again largely due to Gmail defaulting to open images.

4 Digital Marketing Trends 2015

Earlier in the year Dr Dave Chaffey predicted what he saw as the 10 key trends for the year ahead. The post also provides 30 cutting-edge digital marketing tools and techniques to help grow your business which is super handy. Dave’s big trend predictions for 2015 were:

1: Content Curation Tools
2: Content Recommendation, Personalisation, Retargeting and Effectiveness Review Tools
3: Content distribution services
4: Integrated SEO, Content and Social Media Management
5: API service integration and Hubs
6: User Engagement and value optimisation
7: Actionable Analytics and intelligent analytics
8: From Conversion Optimization to Experience Optimization
9: Digital Channel Sales Optimisation
10: Wearables, Augmented and Virtual reality

Published more recently Dave has a new post and slide deck advising on digital trends for 2016.

5 Global social media research summary 2015

Coming in mid-table is our post on social media usage stats, updated just a couple of months ago. Social networks are now so well established, that there are now a core ‘top 5’ social networks which are most popular which doesn’t change from year-to-year. But, as we’ll see in this post, the most popular social media sites vary a lot by level of usage in different countries and with demographics. When comparing the most popular social networks it’s best to review them by active account usage, not just the number of user accounts. We’ll also see in this summary that some social networks are growing more rapidly than others while some are now in decline.

6 10 free online marketing tools that every “hands on” marketer should use

It’s easy to see why this post was so popular. Online marketing tools can save marketers time and increase their effectiveness. There are hundreds of tools out there, so selecting the right one can be tricky. In this post, Dave Chaffey gives his selection of the 10 best free tools to use, and how to make the most of them. Extremely useful for marketers at all levels.The tools are grouped into 8 sections so you can see what part of the marketing process they will enhance:

1. Reviewing the latest developments in your industry
2. Managing social media updates
3. Finding influencers
4. Understanding customer search behaviour
5. Competitor site benchmarking
6. Off-page backlink analysis for SEO
7. On-page markup analysis for SEO
8. Understanding overall online marketing effectiveness

7 10 examples of effective Facebook ads in 2015

Facebook has solidified its market leading possition as the top social media platform in 2015. This along with its throttling of organic reach has meant Facebook has increasingly become ‘pay to play’ and so adverts have become increasingly popular. To make ads that stand out it is helpful to know what best practice looks like, so we put this post together to show good examples of Facebook ads, one for each of the different categories of Facebook ads, which are as follows:

Clicks to Website: Send people to your website.
Website Conversions: Increase conversions on your website. You’ll need a conversion pixel for your website before you can create this ad.
Page Post Engagement: Boost your posts.
Page Likes: Promote your Page and get Page likes to connect with more of the people who matter to you.
App Installs: Get installs of your app.
App Engagement: Increase engagement in your app.
Offer Claims: Create offers for people to redeem in your store.
Local Awareness: Reach people near your business.
Event Responses: Raise attendance at your event.
Video Views: Create ads that get more people to view a video.

8 The Digital Marketing landscape 2015

At number 8 we have a post which is more of a combination of posts. It gives a round up of all our infographics of 2015, which are great at providing concise and actionable marketing advice in a visually appealing form. The infographics cover:

The state of Digital Marketing 2015
The state of content marketing 2015
The state of search marketing 2015

9 Using the 70:20:10 rule in marketing

With new marketing tools and techniques available to us almost daily, it can be difficult to know where to prioritise your marketing activities to get the most ‘bang for buck’. That’s where this post from Dr Dave Chaffey comes in. Dave introduces the concept of using the 70:20:10 rule in marketing, where most effort goes on tried and tested safe content, some time goes on moderatly risky content to appeal to new audiences and occasional experitments which more risky content types are undertaken.

10 15 unstoppable trends which will shape marketing in 2016

Last but not least, my post on the key marketing trends of 2015 looking back from the vantage point of the end of the year. We give all the results of some of our major studies undertaken throughout the year, and report on the big headline changes that the 2015 has brought. A good way to sum up a year in digital, if I do say so myself.

If you’re looking for a more comprehensive view, to keep our members up-to-date through the year we release an update to the latest consumer digital adoption stats and benchmarks each quarter.

Expert member download – Digital Marketing Benchmarks

Use the 100+ slides in our online benchmark download and the companion guide to consumer adoption to compare your digital marketing effectiveness and make the case for more investment.

Access the Online Marketing Benchmarks statistics compilation

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