Article

New online shopper study shows the value of Facebook, Twitter, Google

Fewer shoppers come from Twitter than anywhere else, but they spend more per order than anyone.

September 13, 2011

E-commerce provider RichRelevance has released its new Online Consumer Report derived from analysis of customer viewing and shopping behavior on major U.S. online retail sites. The new study drills into more than 200 million shopping sessions to uncover how Americans are browsing and shopping online – and how their behavior varies depending on whether they are coming to a site from a bookmark, search engine or social network.

As retailers prepare for early holiday shoppers (the NRF reports that more than 37 percent of shoppers plan to do some holiday shopping by Halloween), these key findings offer new insight into how consumer behavior may be impacted by a volatile economic climate.

Online consumer report overview

• Online conversion rates—the ratio of purchase sessions to shopping sessions—has remained relatively unchanged between 2010 and 2011, based on a year-on-year comparison of mass merchants. This rate was 2.1 percent in August 2010 and remained 2.13 percent in August 2011.
• Overall online average order value has dropped from $128.27 to $116.58 in this period. The decline may be attributed to several factors, including increased cost consciousness and increased shipping efficiencies that encourage smaller purchases.
• Shoppers behave very differently depending on how they arrive at the retail site. For example, while fewer shoppers come from Twitter than anywhere else, they spend more per order once they are on the site.

Spotlight: Social networks and shopping behavior

• Traffic from both Twitter and Facebook to retail sites has grown dramatically in the last year—but these networks still account for a very small portion of total traffic (less than one percent).
• Facebook is growing the most dramatically of any channel as a source of retail shopping traffic. Facebook has upped its contribution by a whopping 92 percent between August 2010 and August 2011.
• While shoppers who come to retail sites from Facebook and Twitter are less likely to make purchases (conversion rates of 1.2 percent and 0.5 percent respectively), they spend more per order than shoppers who come through Google. In fact, shoppers from Twitter had the highest average order value ($121.33) of all shoppers.

Spotlight: Search engines and shopping behavior

• Organic search engine traffic remains a primary traffic source for mass merchants, driving 18 percent of all traffic in August 2011.
• Google accounts for the bulk of all organic search traffic to these major retailers, with 81 percent coming from the Google firehose.
• Yahoo and Bing (including msn.com) account for 9.7 percent and 7.5 percent of traffic, respectively, while just under two percent arrives from AOL (1.7 percent)
• AOL has the highest conversion rate and slightly edges out Yahoo for highest average order value ($105.27).

Summary: Channel conversion and value

Methodology

The information in this report is derived from analysis of customer viewing and shopping behavior on selected major U.S. online retail sites. During the August 2011 measurement period, these sites hosted more than 200 million shopping sessions, resulting in more than four million orders for a total value exceeding US $500 million.

In cases where multiple referrers existed for the same session, the first referrer, based on the timestamp, is identified as the source.