Editor’s Note: Commentary from Google’s Vice President of Marketing, Americas, Lisa Gevelber
People are making decisions faster than ever before, and they expect to be able to act on those decisions instantly.
Impatience, immediate action, instant gratification, even some impulsiveness—these are just a handful of descriptors for behavior today. We have all been empowered and emboldened by information. With our phones acting as supercomputers in our pockets, we can find, learn, do, and buy whenever the need arises—or the whim strikes.
This ability to get things done in the moment—paired with the fact that brands are getting better at delivering speedy, frictionless mobile experiences—is driving expectations higher than ever.
Since 3 in 4 smartphone owners turn to search first to address their immediate needs, we dug into search data to better understand what this shifting consumer behavior looks like, and how it impacts all of us as marketers. Here’s what we found:
- People are making on-the-spot decisions – search interest in “open now” has tripled in the past two years. At the same time, searches for “store hours” have dropped.
- People expect to get products and services immediately – we can illustrate this with search data. Mobile searches related to “same-day shipping” have grown over 120% since 2015, people are no longer willing to wait even a few days for their order to arrive. We’ve actually seen that for every one second delay in site load time, conversions fall by 12%.
Gevelber, L. (2017, August). Micro-Moments Now: Why Expectations for “Right Now” Are on the Rise. Think with Google.