As cited by the New York Times, Engine Ready analyzed 18.7 million visits in a span of two years on web sites run by 27 of the company’s 500 clients. The study compared how customers react to paid listings and organic search results. Paid listings have 17% more successful transactions on the site than those who arrive on the site through organic search results. Also, these site visitors spent about 18% more on each order.But the most effective site visit was brought by neither of two. Instead, the study found that those who visit Internet marketing site through direct traffic coming from users typing the URL of the site on their browser. Users who came from bookmarks also produce better revenue for the site.
Let’s make sure first we understand what this means. What it mean is that when a visitor types a URL in the browser bar (example: brands Amazon.com, ebay.com) the likelihood to conversion is higher. What does this tell us about generic domain names though? Too many variables here, such as what was the type-in intent? what does the user think? And does the content matches the intent of the user?
A number of examples:
1. Direct Visits: A user is familiar and have an account with Amazon.com, interested in buying a book (happens to me all the time). User visits Amazon.com, locate the book, click to order.
The above example is most likely the most potent traffic on earth however, this is not pure type-in as much as return visits, either by previous consumers or those who were already introduced to the brand via different advertising channels (TV, Radio, Web ad).
2. Direct Navigation: A user is familiar with a brand (example: Amazon.com) but does not remember the brand. The user instead remembers the brand’s concept though (example: Books.com) and while visiting the URL which will take you to Barnes and Noble’s web store, finds what he was looking for and place an order.
This example represents a big part of the type-in world. Generic protect-able domain names that get massive (or fractions) of traffic and are able to convert well.
3. Direct Navigation (2): A user knows what he or she is interested in, but is not sold on any specific brand. In this example user is interested in books and types Books.com
(Note: In previous studies both examples above was referred to as “direct navigation” even though there is a clear distinction between the two)
From the study above we don’t know what percentage is “direct navigation” and what percentage is “direct visits”, however in either case and important to domain name and portfolio owners, the “URL bar” is still the ultimate winner.
Excellent analysis of the direct-nav data, Sahar. I think it’s also important to point out some gaps in the Engine Ready study itself.
In particular, there is a bit of a sample selection problem in this data-set: they are comparing all organic traffic relative to all paid/PPC traffic, which are not comparable sets. In particular, PPC ads are tailored at the designation URL level to send you to the (believed) right page, whereas organic links rely upon the search engine to select the proper landing page based on query. Also, you have to consider PPC versus organic listing density. In most cases there will be 7 organic clicks for every 1 paid click - but, again, this is contingent upon the quality of a given site’s SEO versus SEM efforts. Additionally, since PPC is “money out of pocket” SEM-firms focus on conversion whereas less attention is paid to optimizing meta description for conversions.
Overall, this is an interesting study but doesn’t really answer the questions it set out to evaluate.