16 Tweetable Stats on the State of eCommerce Marketing

Marketers find or are shown tons of numbers that we use to help guide us in decisions. Sometimes making decisions based on those decisions can be really difficult, but sometimes not. In certain circumstances, the numbers give us so much insight that the right answer seems obvious.

There are times when you’ll stare at a report for hours trying to figure out what it means. The report we’re talking about today won’t be like that.

eCommerce platform MarketLive just released their annual mid-year benchmark report that tells us a great deal about where the industry stands today. Their mid-year Performance Index collected data for the first six months of 2013 from over 200 merchant websites and turned out some interesting numbers.

In addition to providing reports on eCommerce key performance indicators like add-to-cart rate, order size, and abandoned cart numbers, they provided statistics on search, mobile and tablet trends for eCommerce websites that we’re going to take a look at today:

The State of Paid vs. Organic Search for eCommerce

• Paid search visits made up about one-third of total search engine visits in the first half of 2013, up from 26% in 2012. (Tweet this stat)

• Revenue from paid search grew to 44% of total search engine visit revenue in 2013, compared to 40% in 2012. (Tweet this stat)

• While growth in paid search visits increased 30%, the decline in organic search visits was only 3%. (Tweet this stat)

• Paid search produced a 2.6% conversion rate, which was 35% greater than that of organic search. (Tweet this stat)

• The average order size of a customer brought in through paid search was $113, compared to the $109.66 order size of an organic search customer. (Tweet this stat)

• Average order size from paid search increased 3.3% from 2012. (Tweet this stat)

• Bounce rate for paid and organic search were very similar, at 34% for paid search and 35% for organic. (Tweet this stat)

• Paid search visitors viewed 7.1 pages per visit, compared to the 6.8 pages per visit of an organic search visitor. (Tweet this stat)

Key takeaway:

Unsurprisingly, traffic from paid search is increasing, and so is the revenue that comes from it. But let’s consider one argument people always make against paid search: it takes traffic away from free, organic search. The numbers from MarketLive help prove that that’s simply not true. If every click on a paid search link was one less on an organic link, then the organic search visits would decrease at the same rate paid search visits is increasing.

The State of Mobile & Tablet Traffic for eCommerce

• One third of traffic in the first half of 2013 was from mobile and tablet devices. (Tweet this stat)

• At current rates, mobile and tablet are expected t o account for almost half of all website visits in one year. (Tweet this stat)

• Tablet revenue in 2013 grew 8 times faster than that of smartphones. (Tweet this stat)

• Smartphone add-to-cart rate improved by 15% while it declined on both tablet and desktop. (Tweet this stat)

• Smartphone conversion improved by 24% in 2013, which is 4 times greater than desktop. (Tweet this stat)

• Mobile revenue is only 2.7%, but that’s a 40% increase from 2012. (Tweet this stat)

• Tablet shoppers make up 11.9% of revenue, an astounding 77% increase from 2012. (Tweet this stat)

• Order size for mobile & tablet is significantly higher than the overall numbers, at $123.60 and $151.42, respectively. (Tweet this stat)

Key takeaway:

How many times a week do you hear that this is the year of mobile? Yes, we’ve heard it in previous years too, but these numbers are hard to argue with. Soon, half of all eCommerce traffic will be on smartphones and tablets. If that’s not a wake-up call to mobile optimize your website, I’m not sure what is. Imagine half of your visitors seeing a broken or unappealing version of your website. It’s also interesting to note how much higher the average order size is on mobile and tablet than it is overall.

You can download MarketLive’s entire report here.

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