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Surprise Finding: Website Traffic Source Analysis at the Shopping Cart

Your website is a leaky bucket. The more traffic (water) you put in the top, the more it spills out. On average only 2-3% of website visitors convert, while only 3 out of 10 people that get as far as the shopping cart convert. That’s less of a bucket and more of a sieve.

So why are we as an industry so focused on website traffic and not on plugging the leaks? Most emarketers want traffic above all and are willing to invest big bucks to get it—through SEO, paid search, display advertising, referral, social media, and so on. These all drive traffic with varying degrees of precision.

However, if you analyze the traffic sources that drive conversions, as opposed to the overall volume of traffic, then a different story emerges. A member of the SeeWhy research team pointed out that email was often the largest source of traffic for ecommerce conversions. Email as a significant source of conversions, yes… but the largest? This warranted further analysis. (…)

Website visitors follow many different paths before, eventually, a frustratingly small percentage will go on to become customers. These paths are hard to visualize, because they rarely represent linear journeys. Many visitors will visit a website several times before making a purchase, probably looping back and forth between pages in what seems, to the website designer at least, a totally illogical pattern.

When shopping, like many activities in life, people are not logical; they are complex bundles of emotions wrapped up in an outer veneer of calm. For many, shopping is an exquisite pleasure to be relished, drawing perhaps from our primeval hunter-gatherer roots as we savor the chase and secure our purchases, returning triumphant. (…)