As smart devices and voice commerce gain popularity, the revenue potential for advertisers is ripe with opportunity!
Smart Usage Surges
A new report released in collaboration by voice platform Voysis and trade publication Voicebot.ai has shined some staggering insight into the adoption of smart speakers and the use of voice searches over the past year. Nearly 50 million (19.7%) of US adults now have access to smart devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo – almost one in five people, compared to less than one percent of the US population back in 2016.
Only social media adoption has seen faster growth, with smart speakers passing the speed in which users adopted both the internet (four years) and television (13 years).
This comes after a busy year for smart assistant sales that were the number one gift given over the 2017 holidays. Both Amazon and Google claimed huge successes, with Amazon stating they sold tens of millions of Echos and Google claiming that they sold a Google Home device every second from October to December of 2017.
Search & Commerce Rapidly Rising
Alongside the growth of smart device adoption also comes the growth of voice commerce. The report states that 26% of smart speaker owners have made at least one purchase on their device, 11.5% of them purchase every month, and 2.1% are making purchases daily.
Interestingly, while the total number of Amazon Echo shoppers eclipse its Google Home counterparts, Google Home users are actually 50% more likely to make a voice purchase.
Going beyond smart device usage, mobile users are also increasingly relying more on conducting searches and purchases via their devices. Over 75% of iPhone owners use Siri, while 42.7% of Android owners have used Google Assistant. And while use with Google Assistant is growing at fast pace, iPhone users are currently 8.5% more likely to make a voice purchase.
As for the most leading verticals, household, apparel and entertainment are all at the forefront of voice-related purchases.
Continued Growth
Smart devices are expected to continue their rapid growth as we reach the 2018 holiday season, with the reporting revealing that 9.8% of consumers who don’t currently own a smart speaker expect to purchase one before the end of the year – which would amount to an additional 50% climb in adoption year-over-year.
It’s highly expected that this growth with sustain over the foreseeable future too, as a January report produced by Capgemini has predicted that 40% of customers will prefer to use a voice assistant over a website or mobile app within the next three years.
Advertisers Need to Speak Up
The Capgemini report goes on to say that brands who provide a good voice assistant experience will generate more positive word-of-mouth communication than those that don’t, and 37% of them would share that sentiment with their friends and family.
It’s quite likely that Google and Amazon will eventually make changes to their search functionality to reward advertisers who are voice-friendly. After all, these vocal assistants are their products and they want consumers to rely on them the same way people now rely on their mobile phones.
With all of this is mind, it’s easy to understand why the growth of voice commerce is ripe with opportunity for search marketers. Experiment with your search campaigns by shifting more consideration towards vocal key phrases. You may just be one of the pioneers to capitalize on quite possibly one of the biggest technological advancements since the smartphone.
Good luck!