Which Resources Drive the Most Traffic to Your E-Commerce Website?

With all the resources available to draw traffic to an ecommerce website, it is hard to determine where to put the most effort. The obvious answer is to choose the resources that result in the most website traffic and that have high conversion rates, but, which resources are those?

Monetate did some research and provided data about where ecommerce traffic comes from and how it is converted. The data was gathered during the first quarter of 2013. The full report can be downloaded here.

When it comes to direct ecommerce traffic, the report states that:

• 31.43% landed on an ecommerce website from a search engine
• 2.82% from an email and
• 1.55% from social media.

When this information is compared to the first quarter of 2012, note that traffic from email has decreased from 3.72% in 2012 and so has social media traffic, which was 2.36% in 2012.

This does not mean that social media is irrelevant for ecommerce. While social media may not bring a lot of traffic to a website, it still drives purchase decisions. Research from Google showed that instead of being a last interaction, social media often acts as an assist in the purchase decisions. Consumers often use social media in the early phases of the decision making process. With that said, focus on driving traffic using search engine marketing and use other marketing strategies to entice consumers across social media and with email.

Other statistics in relation to traffic and conversion rates were also included in the report form Monetate. When it came to conversion rates:

• email came in first with 3.19% 
• followed by search at 1.95% and 
• social media at 0.71%.

Looking at the same sources, the add-to-cart rates were as follows:

• 10.51% from when coming from email
• 6.81% from search and
• 3.24% from social.

And finally, average order value from each source was as follows:
• $96.32 when coming from search
• $83.72 from email and
• $72.31 from social.

Simply having an ecommerce website is not enough. With all the inbound marketing strategies available, and many of them for free, it is important to figure out what works for your business in order to consistently drive website traffic and sales.