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