The company specializes in MarketLive e-commerce solutions has published an interesting study based on data from more than 200 sites during the first six months of 2013. The study focused mainly on the differences between paid results compared to organic search when it comes to things like access to the site, rebound frequency, and snapshots on various market sectors.
Organic vs. Paid traffic
The study provides an interesting insight into where traffic comes to the retail sites, and how it converts.
Paid search traffic climbed a staggering 30 percent, while organic traffic declined 3 percent. Although this decline is not necessarily good, however these data indicate that this increase in paid traffic is not decimating organic traffic, as many advertisers fear. They are not in fact gaining paid search traffic at the expense of organic traffic.
MarketLive also found that paid search traffic rose to 44 percent of revenue from all search engine traffic, including organic. Paid search accounted for about a third of visits from search engines, which is a fairly large increase compared to 26 percent in 2012.
When comparing paid and organic side-by-side visits, there are certainly some noteworthy differences.
- Conversion rates: The conversion rate for paid search was 2.6 percent, versus 1.9 percent for the workforce.
- Order Type: An order from paid search was on average $ 113, which was a 3.3 percent increase over 2012, while organic search brought orders from $ 109.66 on average.
- New visits: Surprisingly, paid search has a lower percentage of new visitors to retail sites, with 58 percent of traffic made up of new visits, while for organic research new visits represent 66 percent.
- Bounce rate: Here the data were quite homogeneous – 34% of rebound frequency for the paid search against 35% of the organic one.
- Pages viewed: Visits from organic research were slightly shorter, with 7.1 pages per visit for paid search compared to 6.8 pages for staff.
Traffic from smartphones and tablets
If you look at the changes in smartphones, the differences between last year and the current year are significant. A third of the traffic in the first half of 2013 came from mobile devices and tablets, and it is expected that within a year to arrive at almost half of all visits to the website (about 44 percent) will come from mobile and tablet. This highlights that it is even more important for website owners to have a mobile-friendly website, while only 52 percent of traders surveyed had the site optimized for mobile.
Even as tablet traffic is significantly increased, growing three times more than that of smartphones. However, while conversions are still quite low for smartphones, they have risen 24 percent from last year, which is a huge leap.
When it came to total revenues, smartphones accounted for only 2.7 percent of income, but increased by 40 percent compared to last year. Same with the tablet, which accounts for 11.9 percent of revenue, but there was an incredible increase of 77 percent.
In terms of visits, 19 percent of visits came through smartphones, which is a 40 percent increase over last year. For tablets, 13 percent of visits come from these devices, which was a 74 percent increase.
But when it comes to the average size of the order, it was significantly higher than the total. Smartphones had an average purchase of $ 123.60, and tablets $ 151.42 on average orders. Conversion rates were 0.59 percent for smartphones and 1.77 percent for tablets.
Further Opinion
MarketLive has found that earnings have increased in all commodity sectors examined compared to last year. The household items category rose 34.3 percent as revenues, corresponding to an increase in visits of 34.8 percent. The lowest improvement of all sectors was clothing, which however rose by 11.3 as revenue. An interesting fact is that the beauty and health sector has increased by 12.9 percent, while visits have fallen by 2.9 percent.
The MarketLive study definitely demonstrates the importance of integrating an SEO strategy to increase organic traffic with a paid ad strategy. It also shows that a mobile and tablet marketing strategy is effective, so you need to make sure that your site is mobile friendly, and this will become increasingly important in a global marketing plan for any website in the next year.
