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eCommerce Digital Marketing Benchmarks in 2024
October 1, 2024
15 mins
eCommerce marketing benchmarks are pivotal to understanding how well your business performs compared to the competition and the averages set for your industry. Benchmarks clearly show what’s working across key digital marketing channels.
In eCommerce, paid search marketing dominates as the top sales channel, driving 57.5% of revenue. Direct traffic follows with 25.5%, reflecting the importance of brand recognition and customer loyalty. Email marketing generates 9.6% of sales, while affiliate marketing contributes 6%.
In this article, we'll look at the latest data on the major digital marketing channels to help you refine your strategies and achieve real growth.
Multiple marketing channels like organic search, direct, sponsored, referral, and social all contribute to website traffic. Therefore, exploring eCommerce industry benchmarks is crucial. Organic traffic helps eComs connect with their target audience at the right funnel stage on search engine results pages. Measuring organic traffic is pivotal as it generates consistent and steady traffic. Unlike paid ads, the lifecycle of a piece of content is infinite.
Our eCommerce digital marketing benchmarks analysis starts with organic traffic that tops searches among major digital marketing channels. 1 in 3 eCommerce visitors come from organic search.
Whenever long-term ROI and cost-effectiveness are at stake, organic search beats out sponsored, social, and email, among other traffic-generation channels. There’s more to gain from organic traffic owing to AI overviews.
Longer engagement on your eCommerce website signals positive interaction with your site. However, low engagement time isn’t always a red flag. For example, quick exits might mean users found what they needed efficiently, which is ideal for sites focused on fast conversions.
Low engagement points to potential issues like poor content quality or a subpar user experience.
Anything between 44 seconds and 1 minute and 22 seconds is considered a sound engagement time for eCommerce pages.
Keyword rankings show your website's performance in search engine results for specific terms. If you run a travel agency focusing on adventure tours, you'd want to rank high for keywords like “best adventure travel packages” or “trekking tours.” If you’re currently at #5 for “trekking tours,” use this as a benchmark to gauge your SEO progress.
Tracking keyword rankings is crucial to know:
🟠 How visible your site is for key search terms
🟠 The keywords that need deeper optimization
🟠 How to measure your SEO strategy performance over time.
Bounce rate is among key eCommerce metrics benchmarks to consider. In Google Analytics (GA4), the bounce rate metric is the inverse of the engagement rate.
Simply put, the bounce rate marks the number of sessions that aren't engaged. In other words, a bounce effect occurs every time a user visits your eCommerce page and does not take any action on it or your site overall.
According to the CXL 2024 Benchmarks Report, the bounce rate for eCommerce and retail websites ranges between 20-45%.
Bounce rate patterns:
🟠 A user has returned to the search results page
🟠 A user has closed the browser
🟠 A user has followed an outbound link
🟠 A user stayed on your page but did not take any targeted action and left.
Source: CXL, 2024
For eCommerce, оrganic click-through rate (CTR) indicates how well the site’s content attracts clicks and potential customers.
While top Google search results show an average CTR of 39.8%, eCommerce CTRs range from 0.51% to 2.69% depending on:
🟠 Product type
🟠 Target audience
🟠 Marketing effectiveness.
While organic search is among the core channels that bring conversions, every competitive eCommerce business keeps up with eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks.
An average conversion rate for eCommerce websites swings between 2-3%.
SEO ROI for eCommerce measures the return on investment from SEO efforts based on GA4 data and other analytics sources and tools.
A sound SEO ROI benchmark for eCommerce equals a 5:1 return, meaning $5 profit for every $1 spent on marketing.
ROI in SEO for eCommerce businesses depends on
eCommerce PPC benchmarks are essential for understanding the effectiveness of inline store’s campaigns and maximizing paid ads ROI. For eCommerce stores, paid ads—including search ads, display ads, and social media ads, — help drive targeted traffic and conversions.
Let’s take a look at the all-industry PPC benchmarks:
An average click-through rate (CTR) for eCommerce is 2.69% for Google Search and 0.51% for Display compared with the all-industry CTR averages of 3.17 for search and 0.46% for display ads respectively:
2024 cost-per-click (CPC) shifts indicate slight YoY growth compared to 2023 averages of $2.32 for Google Search and $0.58 for Google Display Network:
The conversion rate (CR) decline in 2024 is estimated at a mere 1% compared to 2023. While search conversion rates have slightly increased, display rates have dropped:
Recent cost per lead (CPL) trends show significant shifts across industries up to 25%:
Finally, here’s the comparisons of Google PPC vs. Facebook paid averages:
Source: IRP Commerce, 2024
On average, eCommerce companies target Facebook ads for traffic campaigns with a click-through rate (CTR) of 1.57% and a cost-per-click (CPC) of 0.77%.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for attracting and retaining customers for eCommerce stores. This powerful digital marketing channel boasts an impressive average conversion rate of 9.6% due to a highly segmented and personalized approach.
This unparalleled figure also explains why email marketing yields such a high ROI, with returns of $36 to $40 for every dollar invested. Among various email campaign strategieBack-in-stock emails stand out among various email campaign strategies, delivering as, back-in-stock emails stand out, delivering a notable 7.28% conversion rate.
Klaviyo (2024) reports that quarter-over-quarter engagement rates in email remain stable across most industries, with minimal changes in open, click, and placed order rates.
Source: Klaviyo, 2024
Targeted subscriber actions trigger automated email flows:
Focused on customer relevance, automation flows drive both engagement and revenue.
Personalization is key to enhanced engagement. Top-performing flows convert recipients at rates 4X higher than average. The median placed order rate is 1.71%, while the top 10% of industries achieve 5.71%.
Flows significantly boost revenue. The top-performing flows, ranked by average revenue per recipient (RPR) across eCommerce, are:
Source: Klaviyo, 2024
Source: Klaviyo, 2024
Email marketing Conversion Rates for eCommerce
📩 The Welcome Flow ranks second-highest converting flow, with an average placed order rate of 2.32%. This impressive rate is only surpassed by abandoned cart flows.
📩 Abandoned Cart Flows deliver the highest revenue per recipient (RPR) and average placed order rate among all marketing flows. This makes them a critical tool for maximizing conversions and driving revenue.
📩 Abandoned Browsing Flow excels at driving traffic back to your site rather than generating immediate purchases. While it may seem less essential than other flows, it boasts a notable click rate of 5.48%, indicating strong subscriber engagement.
📩 Post-purchase Flows boast the highest open rate at 61.68%, indicating strong engagement. However, they have the lowest placed order rate at just 0.54%.
Key Takeaway: Unlike campaigns, which often receive more attention, flows maintain higher engagement throughout the customer journey, ensuring that your campaign efforts are not wasted when customers exit the site. Implementing well-segmented, relevant flows will maximize your marketing effectiveness and drive conversions. By contrast to one-time campaigns worth $0.11, automated marketing flows like abandoned carts and post-purchase messages yield significantly higher revenue per recipient (RPR) up to $3.65.
With 20 years of hands-on digital marketing experience, Promodo is here to boost your eCommerce success. We render customized services to online stores and services ranging from SEO optimization to targeted email campaigns. As a result, Promodo has been awarded by Clutch as a leading digital marketing agency for eCommerce.
Our experienced marketers will help you save on customer acquisition costs and ensure a consistent presence in the eCommerce market. Our extensive experience with numerous eCommerce clients demonstrates our expertise in the industry.
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Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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