Who is buying my snails? Comparing ecommerce conversion rates from different traffic sources

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

June 16, 2010 [1117 views]

I have been studying Google Analytics to look at my traffic sources and conversion rates with some interesting results.

Above is a diagram illustrating the percentages of traffic from each source over the last 3 months, the conversion rates and the percentage of revenue each type of traffic generates for the business. The figures and perhaps the visualisation have given me a new perspective on my marketing and search engine optimisation activities.

The dominance of Google is clear generating 78% of traffic (organic, products and PPC) and 60% of revenue. I was surprised to see how poorly Bing is at generating traffic for my shop and so far not a single sale. This means I need to understand their search engine better I think and look to make sure that I am optimising the site in the right way.

I was pleasantly surprised that 40% of my revenue comes directly or from referrals. Direct traffic clearly includes the increasing repeat business that we can see from the order statistics.

The diagram also highlights the quality of the traffic in terms of how likely it is to convert to a sale; a huge range from 0% - 1.75%. I am not surprised that PPC is at the top of this range and would like to see this even higher. My recent move from broad to modified broad match types should help here.

I take away the following actions from this exercise:

1. I need to continue to optimise the conversion rate of the site as a whole through clearer calls to action and improved text and images
2. I need to understand the real difference between Google, Bing and Yahoo and improve the presence of Market Quarter in these other engines
3. I need to improve the number of referrers. This is likely to increase both referred traffic and search engine visibility.
4. I need to keep measuring to spot changes in the numbers as my other marketing and

I would be very interested to know if others are seeing a similar picture from their analytics and to hear whether you feel that this sort of visualisation (done manually so far) is useful.

What is this project about?

Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter

I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter

If you came to this article because of the title, here is a link to my store where you can buy fresh snails (escargot).

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