Marketers continue to believe that Twitter and Facebook are worth the effort. A new report from RichRelevance states that online retail shoppers who click through from Facebook only convert 1.2 percent of the time. If you think that’s bad, Twitter’s number is only 0.5 percent. But Twitter shoppers actually spend more money when they do order.
Online conversion rates—the ratio of purchase sessions to shopping sessions—has remained relatively unchanged between 2010 and 2011, based on a year-on-year comparison of mass merchants. This rate was 2.1 percent in August 2010 and remained 2.13 percent in August 2011.
Overall online average order value has dropped from $128.27 to $116.58 in this period. The decline may be attributed to several factors, including increased cost consciousness and increased shipping efficiencies that encourage smaller purchases.
Shoppers behave very differently depending on how they arrive at the retail site. For example, while fewer shoppers come from Twitter than anywhere else, they spend more per order once they are on the site.
