When you work with SEO, PPC numbers are your best friends. You can spend weeks devising new ad creative, pitching it to a client and finally launching. All of that work means nothing without brutal honest numbers though. Numbers help us to tweak our campaigns, ads and even keywords. The beauty of online marketing is that we get pretty much all of the the numbers instantly. Something that would take weeks of 3rd party research when running a newspaper ad – would take less than a day in online marketing.
De facto analytics system for small to medium size businesses is Google Analytics, it’s free and easy to use. This month they decided to publish some of their benchmark numbers that they gather through annonymous sharing of websites that run Google Analytics.
While these numbers are very broad and not industry specific, we still think it is interesting to look at them. So here we go:
Overall Site Metrics
| 11/1/09-2/1/10 | 11/1/10-2/1/11 | Difference | |
| Pages/Visit | 4.9 | 4.5 | -0.4 |
| Bounce Rate | 48.2% | 47.0% | -1.2% |
| Avg. Time on Site | 5:49 | 5:23 | -0.26% |
Breakdown by Traffic Sources
| Traffic Sources | Pages/Visit | Bounce Rate | Avg. Time on Site |
| Direct | 4.0(-0.5) | 47.2%(-4.0%) | 5.21(-0.07) |
| Referral | 5.0(+0.1) | 43.1%(-1.1%) | 6.36(-1.48) |
| Organic Search | 4.9(-0.1) | 47.9%(-1.1%) | 4.43 (+0.06) |
| CPC Search | 5.6 | 41.4(-1.7%) | 3.57(+0.07) |
Traffic Sources
| % Visits from Sources | 11/1/09-2/1/10 | 11/1/10-2/1/11 | Difference |
| Direct | 36.5% | 36.8% | +0.3% |
| Referral | 21.0% | 19.4% | -1.6% |
| Search Engines | 27.0% | 28.0% | +1.0% |
| Other | 15.5% | 15.8% | +0.3% |
Goal Conversion (Conversion Rate)
Goal conversion is an ultimate number of them all. As mentioned in the beggning the bottom line is always the cold harsh numbers and most cold of them is the conversion rate. We create ads and campaigns not to win awards for our artistic merit, but rather to enable our clients to sell more of whatever they sell. If we don’t succed in that whatever we did is pointless regardless how well it looks like.
The interesting point about this graph coming directly from Google is that average conversion rate is usually bellow 3%. which seem just about right. A lot of times prospects would have an unreasonable expectation of 10% conversion rate. We always suggest assuming that conversion rate won’t be more than 1%.
