By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to take a look at the EQ, a quarterly trends report that we launched a couple of weeks ago. The debut of the EQ received a lot of media and blog attention—but more importantly, it got noticed by ecommerce businesses that want to be proactive and not reactive in their website optimization strategies.
Each update of the EQ (which stands for Ecommerce Quarterly) will highlight trends revealed by the analysis of a random sample of more than 100 million online shopping experiences. We also will pack the reports with “EQ Takeaways,” ideas that any ecommerce business should consider testing now.
In case you aren’t yet familiar with the first report we released, the EQ1 2012, our research was tied to timely events from the first three months of the year. For instance, Facebook’s IPO announcement and the meteoric rise of Pinterest prompted us to take a closer look at the impact social networks are having on ecommerce conversions and sales. Here are some highlights:
- Facebook accounts for almost two-thirds of all social network referral traffic to ecommerce websites.
- Pinterest went from driving less than 1% to more than 26% of all social network referral traffic in one year.
- Conversions rates from social network traffic are much lower compared to conversions from search or email.
Apple’s announcement that the company sold more iPads than any computer manufacturer sold PCs in Q1 2012, led us to examine traffic from tablet devices compared to dekstop and laptop computers. Some of the insights we uncovered were turned into an infographic (below) that reveals more amazing information, including the amount of mobile transactions conducted using PayPal.
So what’s next? Expect to see an EQ update about a month or so following the conclusion of every calendar quarter, which means EQ2 2012 should be out by early August.
We hope to expand the benchmark report section with each release. In fact, consider this a sneak peak at what’s coming in EQ2 2012 with the addition of research around geography and average order value in our next release. Keep in mind that the EQ is generated using same store data from the five most recent calendar quarters, so the benchmark report data in each release will vary slightly since our random data set could include traffic from different websites.
We’ll also dive deeper into the real story behind web browsers and see if the StatCounter report from May regarding Chrome becoming the most popular web browser is really happening. While I’m on my free preview kick, you may be surprised to learn which web browser is far and away most dominant during the overnight hours.
Lastly, in addition to our commentary, we’re planning to invite some opinionated and respected ecommerce thought leaders to comment on the analysis in future EQs. Stay tuned. I already can’t wait to share EQ2 2012 with you!
