• by Ross Fadner , November 30, 2003

Online marketing analytics company WebSideStory released a study last Wednesday revealing that CNET's visitors had the best visit-to-order conversion ratio of all the consumer electronics sites profiled in the study.

WebSideStory's StatMarket division conducted the study, which showed that CNET's conversion ratio was 28% percent higher than the conversion rate from the next most efficient search engine. The study is based on more than 10 million search engine visits to prominent e-commerce sites that sell a range of electronics products and services.

CNET reeled in purchases from 1.64 percent of all visitors, followed by AOL at 1.28 percent, Overture at 1.25 percent, and iWon at 1.15 percent. Each of the sites involved in the study use WebSideStory's HitBox Web analytics services.

Order Conversion Rates: Searches To Gift/Electronics Sites

          Conversion Ratio 
CNET            1.64% 
AOL
1.28% 
Overture        1.25% 
iWon            1.15% 
LookSmart       1.14% 
MSN             1.04% 
Yahoo           1.01% 
Netscape        0.93% 
Lycos           0.92% 
Google
0.85% 

Source: WebSideStory's StatMarket data, May-October 2003.

Geoff Johnson, vice president of product marketing for StatMarket, emphasizes the difference between this study and most of the others conducted by his company. "StatMarket has always been a source of reliable data on the quantity of visitors search engines refer to other sites globally. This new study focuses on the quality of the visitors the search engines are delivering."

The visit-to-order conversion ratio data is part of a larger StatMarket study that analyzes more than 29 million visits from hundreds of search engines worldwide to dozens of prominent e-commerce sites. The search engine visits include both paid search keywords and organic search listings. Shopping-specific search engines were not included in the study.