How Does Your E-Store Compare?
Like many operators of online stores, I am constantly looking at our conversion rate. How did our sales this week affect our conversion rate for the month?
Did our site updates make a difference in our conversion rates? It is the figure that is always being analyzed.
My first encounter with conversion rates happened way before I become involved with e-commerce. I had just started working at a popular clothing store, and I was told by my manager on duty to make sure that I walked around the ‘head sensor’ when coming in and out of the store. Intrigued by all the employees walking sideways out the front door, I asked why it was so important that we all looked silly walking in and out of the store. I was told that little head counter was the source of my manager’s quarter bonus. She explained to me that the number of sales we have per day are divided by the number of heads that head counter detects, which equals our daily conversion rate.
When I started working with e-commerce sites, my first question was, ‘what should our conversion rate be?’ I think every person working with an e-commerce site has that thought, followed by ‘who has the best conversion rate?’
What should our conversion rate be?
Conversion rates are broken down by the industry in which you categorize site. To help see where you should be, Fireclick offers a great breakdown of industry conversion rates by Global, First Time Visitors and Repeat Visitors. They have industries broken down by Fashion and Apparel, Electronics, Catalog, Specialty, Outdoor and Sports, and finally Software. You can compare what the conversion rates are for this week, last week and see any % changes, along with a graph chart shown by week, month, or yearly.
Who is on top?
The Nielson Company collects data on the top ranking e-commerce sites by conversion rates. These conversion rates can be a little shocking when you are currently working to improve your conversion rate from 2.5% to 3%. Typically, these high ranking sites are catalog and subscription sites, and have abnormally high conversion rates.
Top 10 Online Retailers Based on Conversion Rate – Jan. 2010 (Min 500K Unique Visitors)
| eCommerce Site | Industry | Conversion Rate (%) |
| Schwan’s | Food | 45.80 |
| Amway Global | Beauty / Bath & Body / For The Home | 27.80 |
| Keurig | Coffee | 27.10 |
| vitacost.com | Vitamins & Supplements | 24.40 |
| 1800petmeds.com | Pet Medicine | 24.20 |
| Roamans | Woman’s Plus Size Clothing | 20.60 |
| DrsFosterSmith.com | Pet Medicine | 20.50 |
| Woman Within | Woman’s Plus Size Clothing | 19.10 |
| ProFlowers | Florist | 18.90 |
| Snapfish | Digital Photo Printing / Sharing Service | 17.40 |
Fireclick offers weekly average conversion rates that are an average of all industries, and will typically be more consistant with rates of non-subscription and catalog sites. These averages can be very helpful while comparing your conversion rates to averages. You can take your comparison one step further and look at the average conversion for keywords, emails and affiliates.
| Conversion Rates | This Week | Last Week |
| Global | 4.30% | 4.10% |
| First Time Visitors | 5.50% | 5.50% |
| Repeat Visitors | 3.00% | 2.80% |
| Marketing Conversion Rates | This Week | Last Week |
| Keywords | 3.30% | 3.20% |
| Emails | 3.70% | 3.40% |
| Affiliates | 7.60% | 7.80% |
Now that you have an idea what your industry average conversion rates are and who is on top, make sure your conversion rate is accurate, and compare your site!
Are you always on the go just like me? Use your iPhone to keep yourself updated on your current SEO. These 4 iPhone apps are easy to use, and very helpful for professionals who travel often but need to stay in the know.
Pokeseo
Pokeseo is a great app that lets you check Google PR (Page Rank) for any domain. You can also use this to check the number of Backlinks for Google, Yahoo, Bing and AOL. Use the “email this report” feature to save all your data.
iSEO Tools
iSEO Tools has three features. A SERP Analyzer, inbound links analyzer, and Web directories. The SERP Analyzer will tell you on what page your keyword is found on Google. The inbound links analyzer uses Yahoo Site Explorer service. A great way to analyze how many links you have for your domain. The last feature shows you a list of web directories. You can use this option to submit a link for your domain to increase your link popularity.
SEOIT
SEOIT will analyze a domains >page source elements, HTML source code, title, meta keywords, meta description, meta tags, body text, stop word ratio, word count, meta phrases, length of phrases, stop word removal, anchors and link text, complete link list, complete anchor tag, anchor inner text, images/alt tags, back links, inbound links from Google. This application is very easy to use, and keeps everything well organized.
SEO Search Ranking
SEO Search Ranking App uses a graph SERP Analyzer. This gives you the ability to monitor your current and past rankings. Being able to monitor the change in rankings on the go is very useful. This application also lets you monitor an unlimited number of keywords. You can organize each report by domain categories under “My Domains”.
Pricing:
SEO IT – .99 cents
SEO Search Ranking – $1.99
Pokeseo – .99 cents
iSEO Tools – .99 cents
A client recently asked me to put together a cheat sheet to show to Social Media naysayers. As I was doing the research I started asking myself, why would any brand NOT engage? Have a gander at these 10 data points:
- According to a global Nielsen survey of 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets, consumer recommendations are the most credible form of advertising
- There were nearly 116 million US user-generated content consumers in 2008, along with 82.5 million content creators. Both numbers are set to climb significantly by 2013 (eMarketer, February 2009)
- 86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (Marketing Sherpa, July 2007)
- 81% of online holiday shoppers read online customer reviews (Nielson Online, December 2008)
- 74% agree-including 14% who strongly agree-that they choose companies and brands based on what others say online about their customer service experiences, the survey shows. (Society for New Communications Research, May 2008)
- Mobile user-generated content will generate $5.7 billion worldwide in 2012, up from $576 million in 2007. (“Mobile Social Networking: Opportunities & Forecasts 2008-2013,” Juniper Research, October 2008)
- By 2020, 84% of marketers agree that building customer trust will become marketing’s primary objective, and 82% agree that collaboration with customers will prevail over marketing. (1to1 Media survey of the 1to1 Xchange panel, April 2008)
- Online businesses lose as many as 67% of consumers due to a lack of online product information. (Allurent, January 2008)
- In a study of online UK retailers, 59% reported that the consumer-generated activity leads to better search engine optimization. (eMarketer, 2008)
- 75% of people don’t believe that companies tell the truth in advertisements. (Yankelovich)
among 78% of the study’s respondents. (Nielsen, “Word-of-Mouth the Most Powerful Selling Tool”, October 2007)
With this compelling data in mind, think about Social Media in regards helping your business fill these business objectives:
1. Market research and business intelligence
2. Customer/partner education
3. User groups
4. Product innovation
5. Competitive analysis
6. Peer‐based support, education and innovation/evolution
7. Company‐wide collaboration/learning solution
8. Thought leadership/leads
9. Workplace alignment, communication & training
10. Organic/White Hat SEO Link Building
Now think about the data points above and these 10 business drivers above. Is there any business that is lacking in at least one of those areas? Is your business lacking? Now think about this:
“Social Networking & Social Media Ad Spending to Rise 13.2% in 2010 to 1.3 Billion!”
-eMarketer
I came away from my task yesterday convinced, now more than ever, that all companies should be utilizing Social Media to some degree. I am not saying go full bore if you haven’t engaged yet, but if anything it is time to dip the toes in to the Social Media waters to see how warm it is. The data is saying now is the time, especially with the Wall Street Journal and CNN claiming the recession is at an end.
Tagatum is the new site of a tag-related experiment. From Tagatum:
“…The main supposition of the project is that tags specified by blogs’ authors in their blog posts are associated between each other. Our tag spider runs over blogs feeds, gathers the set of tags from each blog post and then combines tag pairs from the set of tags.”
