Online retailers must reevaluate their pay-per-click advertising campaigns by using a much longer time frame to calculate return-on-investment, according to ScanAlert, whose latest "Digital Window
Shopping" analysis found that while today's consumers may be doing more online shopping, they are taking longer to make up their minds.
Two years after its first report on the
subject, ScanAlert found that "cautious shoppers are becoming more cautious than ever: 26% took more than three days to complete their purchases, 18% more than one week, and 6% more than two weeks.
Compared with 2005, ScanAlert said, these figures represented increases of 23%, 28% and 50%, respectively.
In 2005, the average time between a consumer's first visit to a Web site and the time of
purchase was just over 19 hours, the study showed. Now it's 34 hours, 19 minutes--an increase of about half a day.
"Someone who clicked on your $0.50 keyword ad and didn't immediately convert is
not necessarily a foregone half-dollar investment," wrote Nigel Ravenhill, director of marketing communications, ScanAlert. "There is a good possibility that she will return and buy. Make sure that
your analytics data can reflect the origin of multiple subsequent return visits. Study your AdWords conversion tracking code data, for example, and take a holistic, long-term view of your campaign
spending to arrive at more accurate ROI numbers."
Ravenhill also suggested that online retailers:
Move sales focus from shopping cart abandonment to site abandonment--understand that
abandoning the cart is simply the act of moving on to the next comparison opportunity.
Create and Elevate Comfort Level for Prospects and customers.
ScanAlert analyzed 2.6 million online
sales generated by more than 128 million visitors to 470 Web sites over the past two years--for an average site conversion into sales of 2.07%.