We may not have hit the holiday season yet, but the new year still seems right around the corner – or, at least it does in the e-commerce world, where change happens so fast that the leading companies need to be a few months ahead of everybody else. Retailers hoping to get ahead need to strive for continual improvement. However, it is also vital to move forward in intelligent, strategic ways that make sense for your audience. This is where having a big-picture idea of what is happening in the industry is especially important.
Yotpo’s “The State of eCommerce: Yotpo Benchmark Report” and the 2016 eCommerce benchmark study from the Wolfgang team at Moz highlight real-world shopping activity, providing vital insights into consumer behaviors. There’s a great deal to take away from these studies, but three major trends stand out:
“Search traffic is a vital lifeline for eCommerce sites.”
1. Search is still vital
Online retailers have more opportunities than ever to get traffic to their site, ranging from social channels to traditional email campaigns. With so much variety in the marketplace, there have been whispers that search as a primary traffic channel may slip to the background a bit. This isn’t the case yet. According to Yotpo:
- Search generates 34 percent of site traffic, making it the second most prominent source of visitors behind direct, which drives 40 percent of traffic. The third-place finisher, referrals, only created 10 percent of site traffic.
- Individuals who get to sites via search spend, on average, more than 164 seconds on the site. This wasn’t enough to put search up with leaders such as email, direct, referral and Instagram traffic, all of which led to visitors spending more than 180 seconds on sites (with users from Instagram spending 192 seconds when they reach an online retailer). However, the more than two minutes of engagement from the search channel was much closer to the 192 second pinnacle than it was to the bottom of the barrel, which was Pinterest at almost 63 seconds.
The importance of search-based traffic was seconded by the Wolfgang eCommerce benchmark, which found that:
- Approximately 43 percent of site traffic comes from Google organic traffic – a 5 percent increase compared to the 2014 iteration of this study.
- Google organic traffic is leading to 42 percent of site revenues.
- Search channels are bringing in high-value customers who are doing deep research into products.
Optimizing sites for search traffic may be getting more complicated as Google updates its algorithms and even introduces machine learning principles into its processes, but both studies point to search traffic as a vital lifeline for eCommerce sites.
2. Knowing your audience is essential
The study from the Wolfgang team at Moz found an interesting tidbit while researching conversion rates. The average conversion rate was 1.48 percent, with online-only sites doing better than multi-channel counterparts. However, the differences between two key industries – retail and travel -, point to a stronger issue. According to the research:
- Site visitors at retail stores tended to be more engaged, but conversion rates were below average at just 1.36 percent.
- People visiting travel websites converted at a much higher-than-average rate of 2.04 percent, but they were much less engaged.
According to the study, this disparity comes because retail shoppers tend to research and explore products on the actual eCommerce sites. Travel visitors, on the other hand, seem to prefer to go to external sources to look at where they want to visit and what they may do, then they go to the retailer when it’s time to book a trip. The travel- and retail-specific takeaways aside, one big lesson here is that eCommerce companies depend heavily on an awareness of their users if they want to drive conversions and revenues.
“eCommerce companies depend heavily on an awareness of their users to drive conversions.”
Organizations that are aware of the research and shopping patterns that their customers tend to engage in can optimize their content, marketing and lead generation strategies to reach users in multiple ways and drive conversions. A retailer, for example, may want to ramp up inbound linking between blogs on its site and product pages, while travel sites may be better off ramping up guest blogs on third-party sites and improving performance throughout the checkout process. This way, users coming for no other reason but to finalize a deal can complete the process as easily as possible.
3. Mobile is creating a great divide
Mobile traffic is a hot-button topic in eCommerce as a wide range of users from varied demographics embrace smartphones and tablets. Yotpo found that approximately 38 percent of eCommerce traffic came from mobile users. This is certainly enough to make retailers plan around mobile, but what is especially interesting is how mobile users access sites. There isn’t much of a difference between mobile and non-mobile when it comes to engagement, but there is a huge divide based on the source of traffic. Consider the following Yotpo findings pertaining to the source of page views:
- Almost 97 percent of page views from Instagram came from mobile users.
- Approximately 95 percent of traffic coming from LinkedIn came from non-mobile shoppers.
- Just fewer than 90 percent of site visitors from Reddit were using non-mobile devices.
- More than 60 percent of the traffic from Facebook came from mobile users.
- Referral, search and YouTube traffic from non-mobile devices was almost double that from mobile.
- Only email, Pinterest and Twitter had a mobile vs. non-mobile difference within a range of 15 percent of one another.
The stats point to a clear divide for many sources of eCommerce traffic, something that echoes back to the need to know your audience. Online retailers that understand where their traffic comes from can build their sites to favor the device preferences of those users – without neglecting other devices, of course – to optimize the experience for dominant audiences.
Positioning your site for success in 2017
Technology may be revolutionizing the eCommerce sector, but the takeaways point back to an old adage – know your customers. Whether you are thinking about building out new content streams to reach different audiences through search, using new technologies to keep shoppers engaged regardless of how they get to your site or considering a redesign to better reach mobile users, strategic upgrades can pay off heading into a new year. At Pixafy, we offer end-to-end eCommerce services, from consulting to design and rolling out sites, giving you the tools you need to stay ahead of the pack. Contact us now.
