Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

While at Google’s offices recently, I had the pleasure to hear a Google Product Manager present the company’s view of how information retrieval has changed with the rise of mobile and smartphone adoption.

They are calling it “micro-moments,” the premise being that as smartphone adoption and use continues to skyrocket, consumers increasingly have small bursts of interaction with their phones across search, social, video and email, as opposed to prolonged periods in front of a desktop.

This viewpoint represents a shift from the linear “sit, search and act” desktop mentality that characterized the early days of the internet, in which research and action were typically performed in one sitting while in front of a connected internet device.

These days, according to Google, more searches are done on mobile than on desktop in many countries, including the United States, Japan and United Kingdom.

Google’s micro-moment perspective posits that discovery and action are decoupled as discovery comes in multi-session bursts, across channels, on a mobile device, while action (conversion/purchase) often takes place later on a larger screen, a laptop or tablet device....

The 2015 holiday shopping season already is shaping up to be a gift for U.S. online retailers, based on IBM’s eighth annual Online Retail Readiness Report just out.

As the final tally of 2014 holiday shopping, online retail sales increased 13% from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday with the average order value reaching $125.

Mobile accounted for 21% of sales during last year’s holiday shopping season and IBM projects it will account for 26% this year.

Mobile traffic to U.S. retail websites reached 47% in March of this year, a rather huge increase from the 29% just two years ago.

Mobile traffic is projected to top 55% of all traffic to retail websites by the end of this year, according to IBM.

And along with traffic, mobile sales are up.

Mobile sales accounted for 24% of all online retail sales in March of this year, nearly double the 13% from two years ago....

This past holiday season again highlighted the significance of mobile on shopping patterns, which may be on track to at least one tipping point.

A new forecast now has mobile accounting for a full half of all U.S. digital commerce revenue within two years.

That would be an increase from the 22% of digital commerce revenue attributed now, according to research firm Gartner....

Mobile shopping may not have any great age barriers.

It turns out that older shoppers are comfortable using their phones to shop, with a fourth (25%) of mobile shoppers in the U.S. being 55 or older, based on a new study.

The only other age group that accounts for a larger share of mobile shoppers are those between the ages of 25 and 34, according to a report by Business Insider Intelligence.

Aggregating various research studies, BI Intelligence analyzed the buying patterns by various factors, such as age, with males 18-34 among the most active. Here’s that breakdown....