Every new year, we marketers would like to learn recent trends that we can throw into our decks and reports. But as you might all experience lots of digital statistics do not relate to consumer behaviours. In my personal research, I always felt like some dots are not connecting with each other. Stats such as ‘’SEO is 23% more important’’ actually means nothing.

This is why rather than combining important-looking but random trends into the article, I wanted to dive into Global Web Index consumer survey data for 2023. Here are 5 Key points for me:

1- Time spend online decreased for a long time ever

As you might know, Covid 19 helped digital adaptation. But for the first time in a long period, the time spend digitally decreased to 06:43 minutes. On average this is -13 minutes versus last year. We never see this decrease in the last decade.

This might be a good point to realize that from this year on time spent digitally might not go up further until some other digital revolution changes people’s lives. Maybe metaverse can help with this but nobody knows the answer. GWI states that even in a country that has higher digital audience growth countries saw this decline. So it’s not really about whether a country has good digital penetration or not people now reach their optimal digital time spent.

2- People are less interested in Business related searches

While covid boosted the remote working culture, now due to the major companies almost all of them went to back the office, we saw that people are less engaged with business-related searches on the internet. Also ‘’Finding Information’’ which is one the key reason of using the internet for years decreased -by 14% since Q3 2018.

3- ‘’Finding New Ideas and Inspiration’’ is the top increasing reason to use the Internet 

Even though ‘“Finding Information’’ is still the number 1 reason for using the internet as you might see in the below table ‘’ Finding New Ideas and Inspiration’’ is the top rising reason for using the internet.  Also another point the report states is that people are relatively less interested in the events and news happening in the world or around them.

4 – People are Searching more on Socials

Supported by Google report, the young generation prefers social media such as TikTok and Instagram over Google Search and Maps to find these new ideas and inspiration.

Since 2015, the amount of consumers conducting their shopping-related research on social media has skyrocketed. For Gen Z, these platforms have even exceeded search engines, and millennials are also edging closer to this milestone. Not to mention, things will probably proceed more quickly with recent platform changes. LinkedIn’s most recent update gives users a considerably larger range of potential matches, while TikTok tests out a new search function that highlights keywords in comments and links them to results. There are many excellent examples to pull from when considering how companies may stand out in these trend-driven arenas by monitoring what their audience is as

5-  What Makes People Tempted?

It’s critical for retailers to comprehend what motivates this behavior in order to encourage their customers to act intuitively, especially as inflation continues to bite. As the typical collection of search tools differs significantly among generations, so do their reasons for making impulsive purchases. Therefore, as more people begin using platforms to look for goods and services, marketers will need to adjust their strategy based on the audience they’re trying to reach.

There were the top 5 digital consumer trends that I wanted to underline from the GWI report. I will continue summarizing this report on other categories in the next articles. To access the full report click here