Customer Behavior Across the Funnel for PC Purchases, Part II

• Similarweb’s solution for research analysts offers further insights into the consumer journey from browse to purchase.
• Knowing which other sites consumers visit when they also visit yours can be vital to understand your competition.
• Benchmarking leakage at every stage of the consumer journey provides clarity and reveals areas of improvement.

In the second half of our review of customer behavior throughout the journey from interest to purchase we continue to derive key insights based on Similarweb’s Research Solution. We already covered market mapping and user acquisition strategies. We looked at the breakdown of which kind of sites computer-related search traffic visits which revealed the importance of news and review sites as part of the consumer journey.
Now we will consider the way consumers shop around by looking at the likelihood of a visit to one of the five most important retailers to be part of a session which also includes a visit to one of the other sites.

Which Other Retailers Do Consumers Consider When Browsing or Purchasing?

When starting to consider purchasing a computer, customers take varying journeys before reaching a decision. For example, while a significant proportion of searches for Apple products ends at apple.com, 19% of sessions which include a visit to apple.com also include a visit to the PC section of amazon.com. In addition, 16% of those sessions also take in a visit to bestbuy.com’s PC pages. Other retailers have a much smaller overlap with Apple.
While Apple is clearly competing for attention with retail partners Amazon and Best Buy, brands like Dell have it even tougher. Sessions that include time spent browsing at dell.com also include a visit to amazon.com 33% of the time.

Purchase Behavior

Once you understand how traffic gets to your site, the goal is to move past browsing and close the purchase. Understanding where in this process leakage occurs is key to optimizing the experience of consumers on-site.
Examining the purchase funnel on each site reveals suggested areas of focus. Amazon has the highest overall conversion rate as 12.7% of visits to the PC category at amazon.com result in a purchase. Own-brand retailers performed well at the top of the funnel, maintaining an engaged audience, but finding it harder to convert. Apple and Dell each have conversion rates of around 2%. This suggests that while consumers browse for products on a brand site, they are likely to be visiting other retailer sites to complete the purchase, or make their purchase offline.

by Similarweb