The most valuable referral sources for retailers
Episerver’s benchmark study of 1.3 billion website visits shows half of all B2C commerce sessions now come from a Smartphone.
More than 60 percent of global consumers shop online at least once a month with the majority of those sessions stemming from a mobile device according to the newest research from Episerver, the company transforming digital experiences. Some Episerver customers tracked in The B2C Dot-Com Report even see more than 80 percent of sessions coming through mobile on certain selling days based on 2018-2019 tracking.
Episerver collected 1.3 billion unique shopping sessions across 159 unique retail and consumer brand websites around the world to capture insights about which devices and traffic sources are performing best for B2C organizations selling online. While mobile wins the sessions race, desktop, for example outperforms all hand-held devices with units sold per order at 3.6 items versus 3.3 for tablet and 2.9 for mobile. Digging further, direct traffic and email traffic have the highest units per order by traffic source. As for why, personalized recommendations are more abundant on retail websites and in emails versus other channels listed – leading to a more intuitive and inspirational discovery experience than channels like organic search and social media provide.
“Marketers and merchandisers are always looking for ways to compare their site metrics and channel performance against their peers and for good reason,” said Ed Kennedy, senior director of commerce strategy at Episerver. “Through access to 1.3 billion sessions, we’re able to provide digital commerce leaders and practitioners an opportunity to benchmark themselves against a statistically significant sample of retail and consumer brand websites and get definitive answers to their top B2C commerce questions.”
Key findings from The B2C Dot-Com Report are used to answer these queries:
- What channel is driving the most traffic?
- What traffic source has the highest conversion rate?
- What traffic source is the most valuable?
- When do retailers put the most items on sale?
- What is the best cumulative traffic source?
In addition to providing benchmark data for the 1.3 billion commerce sessions, Episerver offers analysis and advice within the report regarding the various marketing channels driving website traffic.
To see the full study and get access to the benchmark data, download the B2C ecommerce benchmark report.
