Thirty-nine percent of online retail transactions by new customers start with clicks from paid or organic search results and less than 1% come from social channels according to a new Forrester report.
In order to determine how and when shoppers touch various platforms when completing a transaction online, Forrester partnered with GSI Commerce to examine 77,000 consumer orders made over a period of 14 days in April 2012.
Findings in the report include:
• Multiple platforms influence many buyers. While 33% of transactions by new customers involve more than one trackable touchpoint, 48% of repeat customers visit multiple trackable touchpoints. The most popular platforms include organic search, paid search, and email.
• Email and direct traffic matter for frequent customers. Thirty percent of transactions by repeat customers start with an email from the retailer, and an additional 30% type the retailer’s URL directly into a browser.
• Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. Forty-eight percent of consumers reported that social media posts are a great way to discover new products, brands, trends, or retailers, but less than 1% of transactions could be traced back to trackable social links.
“In spite of changes to the interactive marketing landscape and the growing number of shoppers using mobile and tablet devices to access content, core elements of web marketing continue to be effective,” writes Forrester Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.
Download the report here (registration required)
Source: http://www.forrester.com/.
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Not at all surprised by the low level of attribution to social media.
We, as part of the British Population Survey, have been monitoring the influence that social media has on choice of brand and/or retailer for some time and it is consistently in single figure percentages.
Basically we look at 20+ different influences to purchase every month, social media ranks in the bottom third and is not showing any kind of upward trend (brands that people follow on social media ranks even lower).
This seems to fit in with the Forester stats and does suggest that social is probably more of an awareness medium which can stimulate people to do further research. Not a bad thing but organisations need to be wary of creating ‘social media strategies’ and having too many ‘social media experts’ divorced from the rest of the marketing activity.