A study published by WebSideStory reveals the conversion rates of visits from search engines.
Most marketing managers agree that the conversion rate from visit to customer is one of the metrics to monitor on a monthly basis and to try to improve day after day with optimization actions on their sites and with campaign optimization actions. But once you have that ratio, you miss being able to compare it with other sites to see if you are above or below average.
Last week, WebSideStory published a study on the average conversion rates from visit to customer, of the four main search engines.
The study was conducted based on statistics collected by B2C (business-to-consumer) e-commerce websites that use WebSideStory's HBX as analytics software.
The study analyzes data from millions of users who visit these sites and includes data on traffic from both organic positioning and keyword purchases. The total number of sites analyzed accounts for more than 3 billion dollars in annual sales.
The study shows that during the month of January, it was the AOL search engine that achieved the most conversions to customers on e-commerce sites (6.17 %), followed by MSN (6.03 %), Yahoo (4.07 %) and Google (3.83 %).
One possible explanation for the fact that the conversion ratios of users of general portals are higher than those of a search-oriented portal could be that portals that include other content and services in addition to the search engine attract a type of user who is more predisposed to purchase. On the other hand, portals such as Google, which are search-oriented, attract more people who are looking for information and who have less intention to buy.
The study shows that the four major search engines offer much higher conversion rates than the rest of the search engines: the average conversion rate for the month of January 2006 for all search engines was 1.97 %. This figure contrasts with the 2.30 % average for the last 3 months of 2005 (although it is normal that the rate has fallen, since the latter figure includes the 2005 Christmas campaign).
Another consideration about this study is that the conversion rate of the e-commerce sites that have been analyzed are undoubtedly above the average for their sector. This is because using HBX as a web analytics system allows them to optimize their sites to maximize the conversion of users into customers:
- On the one hand, websites using HBX have already eliminated search engine campaigns that do not have economic returns.
- On the other hand, this type of software allows you to know step by step what users do on your web pages and you can, for example, know in which parts of the forms users abandon their purchases, which allows you to modify the forms so that the maximum number of users reach the end of the purchase.
Nevertheless, the study is interesting and allows us to place the figures obtained by our website or those of our clients in a much larger context, and thus be able to know whether we should improve to increase it, or whether we should congratulate ourselves for being above average.
A final consideration about the study: the study was carried out based on e-commerce websites mainly from the United States. That is why AOL's ratio is so high. It would be interesting to have this same study, but with figures that refer to e-commerce in Spain... the question is: would we see Terra appear among the search engines with the highest conversion?
The data:
Average conversion rate for the 4 largest search engines, on e-commerce sites, in January 2006:
AOL: 6.17 %
MSN: 6.03 %
Yahoo: 4.07 %
Google: 3.83 %
Average number of searchers: 1.97 %
More information about the study Internet News and in Websidestory
