Check out the updated 2017 version of this study here!
Being a digital marketer, I spend my day knee-deep in data. The time I don't spend analysing it, I spend explaining its significance to a client or junior colleague or arguing its significance with a client or senior colleague.
But after many debates over the importance of bounce rate, time on site, mobile conversion rate and the colour grey for buttons (our designer partook in that last one), we're never much closer to an agreement on significance.
Our industry is swimming in data (thanks Google Analytics), but at times we're drowning in it.
Numbers without context mean nothing. Data in the hands of even the savviest marketer is useless without a context to evaluate its performance against competitors or the industry at large.
Which is why we need benchmarks. Through benchmarking, marketers can contextualise data to identify under-performing elements and amplify what is over-performing. They can focus on the KPIs that are important, and recognise whether they are achievable.
Benchmarks also give context to those who aren't familiar with data. One pain point that digital marketers face globally is communicating their performance upwards. There are very few 'digital natives' sitting in company boardrooms these days but plenty of executives who know their numbers inside out.
Industry benchmark data arms us with perspective and framework when we need to communicate upwards. It ensures we get pats on the back when deserved and additional budget released when required.
Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports
Google, you might argue, have already solved these problems.
The upgrade and roll-out of Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports has been met with plenty of excitement for these reasons. With its large data set and nifty options to chop up the data by geography and website size, for a minute it certainly seemed like the benchmarking of our dreams. And while we recognise its usefulness to benchmark against real-time data (comparing a surge of traffic from a particular location for example, or seasonal demands), it still left us short of the hard data insights we were looking for.
We wanted reliable KPI data that went beyond user behaviour. We wanted average conversion rates and average transaction values as well as 'softer' engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time on site.
Most importantly, we wanted to know which engagement metrics actually correlated with the conversion rate, so we could narrow our field of analysis and efforts in pursuit of a healthier bottom line.
Which is why we went out and got our own and generated this e-commerce KPI report.
Data and methodology
We analysed the 56 million visits and approximately $252 million (€214 million) in revenue that flowed through 30 participating websites between August 1, 2013 and July 30, 2014. The websites were in the retail and travel sectors and included both online-only and those with a physical store as well as an e-commerce site.
We averaged stats on a per-website basis, so that websites with high levels of traffic didn't skew the stats. We had more retail participants than travel participants so the average e-commerce figures are not the midpoint between travel and retail but the average figure across all study participants. Revenue is attributed on a last-click basis.
Results
Here is a highlight of some of our most relevant and interesting findings. For all the data and results, download the full report on WolfgangDigital.com.
Average KPIs: Bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate
First, we calculated some averages across engagement KPIs and commercial KPIs. If you are an e-commerce website in the travel or retail business, you can use these numbers to evaluate how your website is performing when set against a broad swath of your industry peers.
Well, remember the conversion measured here is a sale. If your conversion rate is lower than the study average don't fire your CMO straight away; check if your average transaction value (ATV) is higher. If they balance each other out you are all good – if they don't, it's time to start digging deeper. Does the 1.4% conversion rate give you a smug tingly feeling or a stab of panic?
We often break down conversion rate into two parts: website-to-basket and basket-to-checkout. Industry norms tell us expect about 5% CR on website-to-basket and 30% on basket-to-checkout. Check which one of these conversion rates is most out of kilter on your site, then focus your attention there. This exercise will often give greater visibility on where the hole in your bucket is, Dear Liza.
Another factor in this analysis is that online-only retailers tend to enjoy higher conversion rates as the consumer must transact via the website. If you have an offline presence, a lower conversion rate comes with the physical territory as your site visitors may convert in store.
KPIs by device: Mobile under scrutiny
Next, we segmented the data by device: desktop, tablet and mobile.
We found that although mobile and tablet together accounted for nearly half of website traffic (43%), they contributed to just over a quarter of revenue (26%).
Mobile alone accounted for 26% of traffic but only 10% of revenue. This suggests that while mobile is a favoured device for browsing and researching, it's the desktop where users are more likely to whip out the credit card.
When we looked at conversion rates by device, this confirmed it.
What data matters: The correlations
We wanted to know which engagement figures had an influence (if any) on commercial ones.
Then we'd know which behavioural metrics were worth trying to improve to lift conversion rate, and which metrics we could finally label insignificant.
We did this by calculating correlations. A correlation ranges from 0 to 1, so 0 indicates on no correlation at all, while 1 signifies a clear correlation. A negative correlation indicates that as one variable increases the other decreases.
Time on site (0.34) and pages viewed (0.35) both had positive correlations with conversion rate, so our advice is to look at how to improve these metrics for your site to benefit from a higher conversion rate.
We delved into the device data and found mobile was the only device with positive traffic (0.29) and revenue (0.45) correlations to overall conversion rate. In fact, that 0.45 correlation rate between mobile revenue % and conversion rate was actually the strongest correlation rate across all factors we measured.
We infer that while the mobile conversion rate is depressingly low, a mobile user is still somebody with purchase intent who is likely to convert later on another device. The lesson we took from this is to make sure your website is mobile-optimised, particularly for ease of research and browsing content.
Finally, the time came to talk about bounce rate. Our Excel wizard had converted the data to an 'un-bounce rate' (1 minus the bounce rate) for consistency with positive time on site and pages viewed metrics. We gathered round the spreadsheet.
He revealed there is actually a negative correlation (-0.12) between un-bounce rate and conversion rate. This correlation signals that it couldn't be less influential on conversion rate, so for those unable to sleep at night for bounce anxiety, we're delighted to let you sleep easy.
Increasing your conversion rate may not be as complex a task as it seems.
Our KPI study shows that if you can increase pages viewed and time on site it will push up your conversion rate (content marketing for conversion optimisation anybody?).
We've also proved that mobile matters. Don't be discouraged if your mobile conversion rate pales against desktop's performance; keep driving mobile traffic and revenue (however minor) and you'll see the difference in your bottom line.
Read the full results broken down by industry level by downloading from the Wolfgang Digital e-commerce KPI Study.
Great post. Nice to get a feel for some averages although there's bound to a number of businesses out there that have very different trends - especially those using content marketing as a model to attract visitors. I take it the ecommerce websites in the study targeted consumers rather than B2B?
Hi Simon, glad you enjoyed the post.
Yes, all the websites in the study were B2C. Mostly retail and travel industries. We didn't segment into those using content marketing and those not, but we'll definitely keep that in mind for the next study!
Al
I'd be interested to see how e-commerce websites that are B2B targeted compare. I'd also break that down into business sectors where buying on credit is the norm vs where clients are generally expected to pay up front because that could dramatically affect the conversion rate.
It makes perfect sense, the recipe to high conversion rate is:
None of the numbers presented support your claim. That is not say that I disagree with what your are claiming. I agree that mobile is important but not for direct conversions.
Taking the data from the "Conversion Rates by Device" and "Devices" info-graphics you see that out of 1000 user 260 are mobile users, 0.61% convert 1.58 conversions provides 100$ in revenue which results in 63$ per conversion. This compares to 69$ and 72$ for table and desktop respectively. So not only do mobile user convert less, they also spend less when they do.
All this is to say that your mobile strategy should most probably not be focused on conversions, but rather driving engagement, ease of product research (as you suggested) and getting people to a physical store or other device.
It would be interesting to test the claim that mobile users drive higher conversion rate on other devices, by checking if sites with higher percentage of mobile users have significantly higher conversion rates on desktop or tablets. However you may not have sufficient data in your dataset as you only have 30 sites to draw a sample from.
Hi Nick,
Either I'm not reading your comment right or you aren't reading the study findings correctly.
But I'll respond to your points as I read them. Sincere Apologies if I'm misinterpreting your comments
1/ the recipe to high conversion rate is:
The data definitely isn't advocating increasing your bounce rate. In saying there is a very low correlation it is stating that your bounce rate whether high or low doesn't impact you conversion rate. I've given 3 reasons as to why this could be in the response to Daniel Moore's comments below.
2/ "None of the numbers presented support your claim...
Taking the data from the "Conversion Rates by Device" and "Devices" info-graphics you see that out of 1000 user 260 are mobile users, 0.61% convert 1.58 conversions provides 100$ in revenue which results in 63$ per conversion. This compares to 69$ and 72$ for table and desktop respectively. So not only do mobile user convert less, they also spend less when they do."
The data is not saying (nor do we claim) that a mobile user spends more. The data states those websites who fared better than average on mobile revenue also fared better than average on conversion rate. This is a correlation calculation, not a calculation of average transaction value per device.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the response. I was being facetious with my recipe, so it may have come across a little strange, so here is my explanation about the two points you raised.
You state in bold " there is actually a negative correlation (-0.12) between un-bounce rate and conversion rate.". To me negative correlation between X and Y means the greater the value of X the lower the value of Y. So higher bounce rate (lower unbounce rate) will drive a higher conversion rate. This may not be what you meant but this is how I interpreted it.
Your claim is "Mobile matters" even though it shows the lowest conversion rate of all the devices. To support this claim you turn to mobile revenue since it happens to be correlated to the conversion rate. I do not see a link here. Remember correlation does not prove causation. Logically one would think that it is an increase in conversions that cause mobile revenue to increase and not the inverse as you we seem to suggest (at least as I read it).
Looking back I'm not sure why I included my calculation, however my intention was not to suggest that your are claiming that mobile user spend more. It was quite the opposite, I was simply showing, with your numbers, that mobile sucks for conversion.
Again, I do not disagree with your claim. I just feel you could have done a better job of supporting it. Since you have this data available it would be great to see it done. The value of mobile is at the forefront of web marketing these day. No one doubts its importance. The question (I believe) that every one is asking is how best to capitalize on it.
The time it takes to load web is directly proportional to the users who leave it. 1 second delay can cost a pretty penny more in lost sales. If you do not believe, take a look at:
Assuming that the data on which they are based belong to the US market, can get an idea where the shots go.
Therefore, make sure your website is as quick as possible to load. Use all the tools you can, minimizing http requests or optimizing images, among others.
Great stats, Oscar! Doing some research myself about how big of a factor page speed is; do you know of any studies I can look at?
Hi Oscar,
Good point I'll be sure to include site speed correlations next time.
Hi Alan,
Interesting stuff! I was quite surprised to view the full study results and hear "don't fret over bounce rate. Our correlation study shows it is inconsequential to conversion rate". Looking at stats all day I generally tend to look at bounce rates a lot, though this varies by industry of course.
I'd be interested to see the same study in other markets too!
Hey Daniel, Thanks for the comment. you werent the only persone suprised by the bounce rate finding. Here's my further thoughts on that particular finding (duplicate content alert, this is a copy & paste from another comment respsonse):
Like you I was suprised at first when the data showed very low correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate. But the more I thought about it the more I understood why this could be. Here are 3 reasons I came to as to why bounce rate has next to no correlation with conversion rate:
a/ As website engagement metrics go, bounce rate and conversion rate could not be further apart. Bounce rate measures somebodies very first interaction with your website, conversion rate is a measure of their last interaction priot to exiting. There are a rake of far more informative & revealing metrics in between the two, such time on site, pages viewed, added to basket, view of key page (eg delivery & returns information), newsletter subscription, click to call events etc, all of which are closer to the conversion so more likely to influence.
b/ The “all bounces are bad” thinking is dangerous. Consider the following searches: somebody Googles yourwebsite + phone number, yourwebsite + opening hours , yourwebsite +discount code, yourwebsite + price, yourwebsite + reviews, yourwebsite + testimonials, yourwebsite + returns. Google directs them to the appropriate page on your website they get the info and leave. These are all examples of "good bounces" conducted by an interested customer who is close to conversion.
c/ The Paid Social Conundrum. First of all let me say I believe content marketing will increase your conversion rate. Creating quality content for your website users can only enhance their likelyhood to convert. If you are promoting your content via paid promotion such as Facebook ppc, Twitter ppc, Taboola or the like, you will know these channels are great for getting eyeballs on your content but the users tend to read the content and then return to Facebook, Twitter or where they were before your nice creative enticed them to visit your website (ie bounce). These paid promotion channels will increase your website bounce rate, but if the efforts are underpinned with solid content you can expect some of the new users won to come back and convert and existing website users to be more likely to convert too.
I hope those points make sense.
Yes we'll be expanding the study scope in 2015. What markets would you like to see?
Hi Alan,
Nice digging into various Benchmarks (for showing the success / failure of marketing methods) - As far as it is concerned with eCommerce website, I believe in increasing conversion and also cutting conversion time (as much as possible).
As some other commenters have pointed out, these are pretty big buckets (retail, travel & ecomm) - still, it's a starting point and an interesting conversation to have with clients. I prefer studies like this with some actionable data to either a) speculation or b) data with nothing pulled out of it (though the raw data can be SUPER interesting!)
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the kind words Matt-Antonio. We actually did go deeper into the buckets and segmented Travel into "package purchases" and "single purchases" (e.g flight/accom/insurance) and the retail bucket into "online only" and "online and offline". All 4 sub-buckets showed distinct KPI patterns.
However these results were only made available to participants as a think you for sharing their data. Page 17 of the full report gives a little bit of detail.
Maybe we'll make these segments the focus of our next study!
Insightful study to give us some quality benchmarks to compare to. I've already sent this out to our agency's SEO team to help us have some background data on where they are in comparison to industry averages. A lot of the time clients have no idea what a good bounce rate or conversion rate is for SEO.
The by device breakdown is especially useful as we have seen huge variations in conversion and revenue numbers for our clients looking at desktop vs tablet vs mobile. Seems like there are still huge barriers to e-commerce conversions on mobile and it is still largely a leisurely "browsing" platform.
Great post to take into account when dealing with future marketing endeavors and outreach. While I already had some idea from personal research that these trends existed, this concentrates my thoughts and will affect my decisions moving forward.
Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to put this together - we appreciate it!
Nice post Alan.. I'd even go as far as saying it's 'sh1t hot'! :-)
Really impressive piece of insight, decent creative too, fair play!
On the ball Luke;)
Thank you so much Alan for sharing your knowledge with us.
We do the precise number set or KPI's for retail clients in Australia, and your numbers do not correlate to the Australian market. Very soft.
Firstly we find a very strong nexus between BR & Conversion. No doubt there are outliers, but a low BR and time on extended time on site leads to quality conversions. I am surprised you have made this comment. The comment in some ways conflicts with page views & time on site.
Secondly you state 500k in site visits = 1M Euro
In Australia 500k in Site visits is 5M AUD and that is average.
Hi John,
Thanks for your comments, I'll do my best to address both of them.
1. Like you I was suprised at first when the data showed very low correlation between bounce rate and conversion rate. But the more I thought about it the more I understood why this could be. Here are 3 reasons I came to as to why bounce rate has next to no correlation with conversion rate:
a/ As website engagement metrics go, bounce rate and conversion rate could not be further apart. Bounce rate measures somebodies very first interaction with your website, conversion rate is a measure of their last interaction priot to exiting. There are a rake of far more informative & revealing metrics in between the two, such time on site, pages viewed, added to basket, view of key page (eg delivery & returns information), newsletter subscription, click to call events etc, all o f which are closer to the conversion so more likely to influence.
b/ The “all bounces are bad” thinking is dangerous. Consider the following searches: somebody Googles yourwebsite + phone number, yourwebsite + opening hours , yourwebsite + discount code, yourwebsite + price, yourwebsite + reviews, yourwebsite + testimonials, yourwebsite + returns. Google directs them to the appropriate page on your website they get the info and leave. These are all examples of bounces conducted by an interested customer close to conversion.
c/ The Paid Social Conundrum. First of all let me say I believe content marketing will increase your conversion rate. Creating quality content for your website users can only enhance their likelyhood to convert. If you are promoting your content via paid promotion such as Facebook ppc, Twitter ppc, Taboola or the like, you will know these channels are great for getting eyeballs on your content but the users tend to read the content and then return to Facebook, Twitter or where they were before your nice creative enticed them to visit your website (ie bounce). These paid promotion channels will increase your website bounce rate, but if the efforts are underpinned with solid content you can expect some of the new users won to come back and convert and existing website users to be more likely to convert too.
2. So after consulting Google currency exchange I see 5M Aud Dolars is 3.5 M Euro. So we can see Aussies are spending 3.5 times more than their European counterparts online per visit. It adds up that they are spending more, the average wage in Australia are considerably higher and your economy has been doing famously well while the rest of the world and Europe in particular has been struggling. I've also heard anecdoctal evidence that global retailers charge a premium in Oz as the market can tolerate it (meaning you need to spend more to get the same).
I'd love to see your figures btw, if you have published them please send me a link. I'm a big believer that the more data we analyse the smarter we get.
Hi Alan,
Nice post, it would be much better if you tell us region from where you pickedstores because the data you shared varies highly on country basis. If you choose websites from multiple countries then they could be bifercated according to region.
But overall it is a great post, thanks for sharing this data with us
Hi Shariq
The retailers and travel agencies in the study were mostly based in the Republic of Ireland. Around 60% of their revenue was from the domestic market, and the remainder of revenue was international (mostly UK, US, and Europe).
You can delve into our findings a little more by getting the full report from our website:
https://www.wolfgangdigital.com/blog/digital-market...
Cheers,
Al
Thanks for sharing this, actually I have worked for both B2C ecommerce and B2B ecommenrce and have observed a vast difference in terms of almost every thing. Now your data is more useful with this information.
Glad it's useful for you Shariq:)
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the study, and I understand this is for the purpose of a broad-based benchmark. I have qualms about 'retail' as one bucket, though - it's quite a bit of variation in, say, a luxury good ecomm store to a loss-leader like Target, Wal-Mart, et. al. in terms of conversion rate and associated revenue. Would you be able to provide any kind of further breakdown about the particular niches within the retail vertical that you looked at in your research?
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for the kind words & the question.
If you flick to page 19 of the full study you will see information on the inverse correlation between average transaction values and conversion rates. We had both high end luxury retailers as well as cheap & cheerful retailers contribute data to the study.
The most interesting categories of retail website that emerged when deep diving the data were "online only" websites and "online and offline" websites. This categorisation of website gave a very strong indicator of where the conversion rate would land. The "online only" websites enjoying higher conversion rates, we believe this is because if their website user wish to buy they must seal the deal online, while the online and offline retailer will have a lot of "research online purchase offline" sales going untracked in store.
The specific results for "online only" and "online and offline" website's were made available to participants only as a thank you to them for sharing their data.
If you are interested in sharing data for our next study, I can share private findings with you.
Ah, okay. Thanks for the clarification.
Mon Plaisir Amanda. Hope it's useful to you.
People use mobile phones to surf the Internet when they are in coffee shops, public transport and so on. Of course it is uncomfortable to take out a credit card and enter number when you are in a public place. But will record the interesting offers and probably re-analyze these products when they arrive home, with a desktop computer that provides a better view, and purchase from the secure environment provided by the home.
Therefore it is important to have a well optimized mobile version of the site, primarely to attract attention and interest in the products and / or services. Your results are proof of that.
Hi Stelian
Yes that is one of the conclusions that we came to from our results as well.
The lack of a reliable cross-device conversion tracking method is still a pain-point in our industry, and until one exists we probably won't be able to verify our theory.
We have seen some interesting results from Facebook's cross-device reports though, and we're excited about what Facebook Atlas will be able to show us.
Stay tuned for that report!
Great post!
Nice KPI's to do something with. Helps out a lot to compare some of our own metrics to those KPI's and especially nice to see my hunch being proven by numbers that we can't rule out Desktop. Not everything is mobile. Responsive sure, but not only designed and optimized for mobile.
Truly a great post!
Jarno
Interesting data. It confirms other researches (like this one)showing that users browse from mobile but prefer to but from desktop.
I would be interested to explore more the link between session time and number of pages viewed with conversion.
Is it here cause and effect or just correlation with hidden underlying factor?
I suspect that it is more the latter. When a person buying something he or she has to view more page (at least shopping cart - checkout - payment) and naturally spend more time on the website.
IMO to isolate this we need to check time spent and pages viewed BEFORE transaction process started, for ecommerce website it can be "Add to cart" button pressed.
Very good broad benchmark data. This confirms my suspicion (and backed by our own data) that, though mobile gets a lot of traffic, it is the desktop users who dish out the credit cards for spend. This article is 2 years old, can anyone share a more recent study - Thanks.
Does the negative correlation with "unbounce rate" imply positive correlation with "bounce rate" to some extent? That might take place when users land on the page they're looking for and directly convert. On the other hand, if you're measuring a conversion as a sale by "thank you" page views, then users can't possibly land directly on them. In such cases, as you say, the bounce rate could be called "less" influential, which I find is hard to define. For example, should our takeaway be that for every money page, you can have approximately 3 other related pages? [ (pages viewed = 0.35) / (unbounce rate = 0.12) = 2.91 ]
I wonder if it's possible to categorize certain negatively correlated factors simply as "not" influential.
Great Article Alan. Although was hoping you get into getting the most out of benchmarks on a much higher and even tactical level. Wrote some thoughts about this, how you could redefine bounce rate, pageviews etc. Would love your approach on this as well, as I feel the same thing clients are missing: how to translate kpi's, metrics and numbers into better insights that go further than the one-to-one if this happens, do more of this.
I guess site Localization would be nice. The big thing about the internet is it's worldwide. In e-commerce, why limit your customers to those who only speak your language? Of course there's cost with that if you don't know how to do it yourself.
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The benchmark numbers presented here are good, I'm impressed.
thanks for sharing this grat information .
Very nice way to measure E-commerce KPI, 2015 will be heavily emphasizing on mobile traffic for conversions. I would say marketers should focus more on improvement of their mobile sites with better placements of CTAs and navigation and I am pretty sure the revenue generation this year will be heavily correlated with mobile traffic directly.
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