Consumer Electronics: Lessons Learned from eHoliday 08

I am continually amazed at the amount and quality of data that is available on just about every topic, if you know where to look. A great example of this is my favorite  web analytics vendor, Coremetrics, who regularly publishes click stream benchmark data about online retail. The Holiday 08 online shopping results are in, including these tidbits (with my interpretations) for consumer home theatre and home office.

• Single page sessions down 11.29%. The percent of visitors to a consumer electronics shopping site who left after viewing the first page dropped from 27.9% of visitors in December 2008 to 24.75% in December 2009. Websites with high one page sessions may indicate a really bad site design that turns off shoppers so much they abandon the site in disgust or frustration. The 11% drop means to me that all the website redesigns that have taken place in the name of convergence are enticing shoppers to linger and learn more.

Note: If your site has higher than average one page sessions, check those click streams to see how they got to you–often a misleading ad word purchase is presenting you in search results where you don’t belong.