Lessons from3 Years of Website Benchmarking

Today’s agenda

• The Website Benchmarking

Initiative

• Results and observations

• University of Richmond

No lack of marketing metrics

Goal completions

Search engine

keywordsLanding pages

Average time on site

Page views

Traffic sources

Pages per visitBounce rate

Visitor repeat rate

Unique visitors

Visits

Conversion rate

Cost per

acquisition

How many visitors do I get each day?

Should I be getting more

visitors?

Does my site perform well on search engines?

How many visits do I get from search engines?

How many pages does each visitor view?

Do visitors leave too quickly?

• We wanted benchmarks to gauge our work

• Found nothing specific to our industry

• Had access to a few Google Analytics accounts

• Thought it could scale with low cost and low risk

• 12 schools participated originally

• Over 20 schools participating now

A few of our participants

Research scope

3 years

21universities

34.5 million

visits

Two areas of research

• Quarterly State of the Industry Trending

Reports• Visits, Visitors, Pageviews, Bounce rates, Traffic sources

• One-time Insights Reports• Operating systems and browsers

• Mobile device traffic

• Search engine traffic

• Social media traffic

• Conversion rates

0K

15K

30K

45K

60K

Visits

2013

2012

2011

Visits increased each year

3.00

4.00

5.00

6.00

Pages per Visit

2013

Pages per visit decreased each year

50% OF VISITS RESULT IN A BOUNCE

Your Website

Bounce

s

Entra

nce

s

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0%

60.0%

Bounce Rate

2013

2012

2011

Pages per visit decreased each year

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 (pro-jected)

Tablet 0 0.00254623606851021

0.0384298025112961

0.0623116291093063

0.0934674436639595

Mobile 0.019 0.050345776105416

0.0761133119295309

0.120414115446163

0.155

Desktop 0.981 0.947107987826074

0.885456885559173

0.81727425544453

0.752357389253759

10%

30%

50%

70%

90%

Tablet Tablet Tablet Tablet TabletMobile Mobile

MobileMobile

Mobile

Desktop DesktopDesktop

DesktopDesktop

Mobile Device Usage

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

Visits by Day of Week

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat39%

40%

41%

42%

43%

44%

45%

46%

47%

Bounce Rate by Day of Week

12AM

2AM

4AM

6AM

8AM

10AM

12PM

2PM

4PM

6PM

8PM

10PM

Visits by Hour of the Day

Google90%

Bing5%

Yahoo5%

Actual Visits to CE sites

Google67%

Bing18%

Yahoo11%

Ask3%

AOL1%

Market Share

Source: Oct 2013 comScore data

Organic Search visitors bounce less than average

Paid Search Visitors bounce more than average

Organic Search Paid Search0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

Industry Average

Search engine bounce rates

91% OF SOCIAL MEDIA VISITS TO CE WEBSITES COME FROM FACEBOOK

X

Our paid advertising sample

Combined data from 8 clients with a total spend of $430,000

generating 384 million impressions and 220,000 clicks

Inquiries ConversionRate

Cost per Inquiry

Bing Paid Search 706 4.7% $57.80

Facebook 676 1.1% $107.47

Google Display 1094 1.4% $76.46

Google Paid Search 3291 6.5% $61.07

LinkedIn 744 6.0% $44.63

Total 6511 3.0% $66.24

Data-Driven Decision Making

Key Performance Measures

Using external benchmarks offers insights on potential anomalies

Local conditions affect our data’s relationship to national trends

Benchmarking against our historical performance offers key insights

“The price of light is less

than the cost of darkness”

- Arthur Nielsen

Two things you can do

1.Join the JMH Website

Benchmarking Initiative and help

create benchmarks!

2.Learn your own site’s benchmarks

and compare them to the industry