Report Shows Soaring Ad Costs and Declining Traffic Drove Cost Per Visit Up 12.4% for Brands
New York, NY—March 20, 2024— Retailers have a key opportunity as they face soaring costs on ecommerce’s most critical acquisition channels, Meta and Google, which have driven up costs per visit by 12.4%–above average by 3%-according to Contentsquare’s new 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. The report highlights influential data and actionable insights retailers can take to meet their customers where they are. Although retailers are hit the hardest, they also have a massive opportunity when considering traffic and revenue trends, especially on mobile, which has become the leading source for ecommerce traffic globally (77%) and accounting for 56% of revenues. With investments in digital customer experience, data shows retailers can experience massive gains in customer retention, conversion, and loyalty.
“Consumers are strongly voicing their preferences, but data shows brands still have room to meet their expectations. How does that translate to business impact? What brands are losing by not improving customer experience is material, and business leaders need to ask themselves how they can capitalize on understanding customer preferences in order to deliver value,” said Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer, Contentsquare. “The data demonstrates a missed opportunity for brands on mobile. It’s clear that they need to evolve the way they think about mobile and optimize the entire mobile journey, not simply the pages or formatting, so it’s imperative to create more seamless experiences.”
Key Data and Takeaways for Brands:
Despite the growth in mobile traffic share, conversion rates fell 5.8% as shoppers tend to make shorter, micro-visits while using mobile devices, and spend 60% less time per session viewing fewer pages than on desktop.
Easy-to-remedy frustrations, including slow page loads and poor visitor responses, reduced revenue by $0.56 per visit.
Retailers can combat frustration by combining audience insights with proactive monitoring to consistently deliver experiences that delight their customers.
“Growth at all costs” is outdated.
Instead of focusing simply on driving traffic, retailers need to shift their focus to improving the overall customer experience in order to drive profitability.
Conversions are 77% higher on desktop than on mobile
Retail traffic is increasingly dependent on paid, as opposed to organic, sources, with paid driving 42.6% of visits and nearly half (47.8%) of all new visits to ecommerce sites.
Instead of chasing higher traffic volume, retailers’ best acquisition strategy may be a retention strategy. Knowing what constitutes an engaging, satisfying experience which encourages customers to stay, convert, and return is key.
Apps provide a unique opportunity for retailers and they provide a critical role in delivering the returning customer experience, attracting nearly 4X the share of returning visitors compared with mobile web, according to Contentsquare’s 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report.
Although apps are typically positioned as a means to foster strong relationships with existing customers, brands were able to expand the breadth of their audience using apps last year – new visitors accounted for 15% of all app visits, up from 10% the prior year.
Download the full report here.
# # #
Methodology
The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights of digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, in order to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.
To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.
This edition of the Retail Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 25 billion sessions and 130 billion page views across 1,673 websites.
About Contentsquare
Contentsquare delivers the power to make the digital world more human. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. The global leader in digital experience analytics, Contentsquare helps brands everywhere transform the way they do business, allowing them to take action at enterprise scale and build customer trust with security, privacy, and accessibility. More than 1,000 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights power the customer experience on over 1 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit www.contentsquare.com
Media Contact:
Erica Ashner