It’s coming to the end of the academic year and I’ve got results on my mind, so when a colleague forwarded to me a copy of Conductor’s report on Natural Search Trends of the Internet Retailer 500 Q2/2010 (full of statistics and grades) I immediately got excited.
You can get your copy of the report here.
It’s well worth picking up and certainly contains some food for thought (and much that I agree with) but parts of it left me baffled, particularly its grading system.
For years now, the success of online traffic sources has relied solely on the principle that the ‘last click wins’. This has been a major flaw in web analytics as customer journeys are often a lot more drawn out and complex that just one visit. In fact, leading web analytics company DC Storm, found that 70% of all sales consist of more than one traffic source.
Their research in December 2008 also revealed that there’s an average of 3.36 visits per sale. When creating reports and performing analysis, the winning emphasis is often solely with those last clicks, and so the remaining 70% are effectively ignored. But in reality, that 70% play a vital role in the customer journey and that ever important final conversion event.
