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Social Media Accounts for Only 2% of Holiday Online Spending
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(Posted on Dec 21, 2013 at 12:20PM )
While retailers are busy focusing on their Facebook pages and Pinterest boards this holiday season, new research is looking at how effective social media is in online holiday sales.Custora, an e-commerce analytics company has suggested that a very small percentage of online sales actually come from company’s social networks. Only 2% of unique sales made since November 1, 2103 started as a social media post that a potential customer clicked on. This information comes from information on 100 U.S.-based retailers, 70 million online shoppers and over $10 billion spent.
So where are the sales originating from?
26% of sales started with an organic search. 25% of sales started with a direct visit to the retailer’s website. 17% originated from email marketing, and 16% originated from a paid search. The majority of the stores included in this story are pure e-commerce stores (they do not have brick-and-mortar locations). They included companies like Etsy, One Kings Lane, Rab, Birtchbox and Bonobos.
According to Corey Pierson, so-founder of Custora, “It is fair to say – and perhaps pretty surprising – that clicks from social very rarely directly lead to orders.†Despite this, Pierson also points out that the retailers with the highest index get approximately 10% of their sales from social posts during the holiday season.
Of the sales that did originate from a social post, 80% of them came from Facebook, 15% came from Pinterest and 5% came from Twitter. The growth of sales from social media is also growing slower than the growth of sales in other areas of eCommerce.
During the holiday season (from November 1 through Christmas); sales from social networks grew approximately 19%, which is inline with overall sales growth during the holiday season.
According to Target, which is was not part of the Custora study; their web traffic grew approximately 70% in the six weeks following their introduction of the Target Awesome store, which highlights products that are widely pinned on Pinterest.
By Melanie Williamson
