Check out our Google Analytics benchmark data for October - December 2020 for B2C eCommerce websites.

Due to the ongoing global effects of COVID-19 on retail and eCommerce, the statistics for Q4 2020 reflect the changes our clients have experienced over the past year.

The businesses indexed are limited to multichannel retailers whose online sales range up to £20 million per annum with average order values of £140. Their websites are all built on the eCommerce platform Magento (an Adobe company). In aggregate, this latest report tracks the behaviour of 4.6 million website visitors across 31 websites. The data includes statistics regarding traffic sources and mobile usage, website engagement & conversion rates.

This quarter, AOV decreased but £ per visit and overall conversion remained the same. The best converting traffic sources were paid and referral and one business had a mobile conversion of 18%. Read on to find out more.

KPIs and traffic sources

Standout figures

• Average Order Values have decreased since both last quarter (£166.54) and Q4 2019 (£179) while £ per visit, bounce rates and conversion rates have improved compared to both those periods. This could indicate that the ongoing uncertainty due to COVID-19 has impacted overall sales but customers who do engage with the websites are converting better.
• Total traffic dropped significantly in line with the dip in total sales.
• Organic search traffic brought 40% of all traffic, 10% down from last quarter, but also converted almost 2 x better than in Q3.
• Traffic from paid searches increased by 3%, indicating that some B2C merchants have invested in advertising in Q4. Conversion on these searches also increased to 3.3%.
• Traffic coming from emails remained at similar levels to Q3 but conversion decreased by roughly half, indicating that B2C merchants should be optimising their email marketing as this audience is not converting as it used to.
• While direct traffic levels were similar to last quarter, the conversion from this increased from less than 2% in Q3 to 2.5%. Similarly, referral traffic increased only slightly but converted twice as much this quarter.
• The traffic sources that converted best were paid and referral.

Device breakdown

Standout figures

• Mobile is by far the biggest source of traffic for B2C websites. This shows that B2C websites need to be optimised for mobile in order to improve the user experience and encourage people to spend more time and money.
• While conversions increased across all 3 devices, desktop increased most from 2.8% last quarter to 4%. Tablet followed in second place with an increase from 2% to 2.8%. Both these figures could indicate that shoppers are a lot more targeted when browsing online and thus, even though there are fewer visitors overall, they are converting better.
• Visitors browsing on tablets fell to 9% of overall traffic.
• Amongst these merchants, mobile conversion ranged from 0.22% to 18% indicating that certain merchants are doing a much better job on mobile than others. One main outlier is a website that is a PWA, which converted extremely well on mobile, most likely as a result of the benefits of PWAs. Find out more here.

Site search statistics

Standout figures

• Compared to the conversion rates included in Tables 1 and 2, it is evident that visits with site search convert at a much higher rate across all devices than visits without site search.
• Site search usage this quarter increased from Q3 across all devices.

Disclaimer: Google Analytics data is not always 100% accurate.

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