AOL Search Shows Best Conversion Rates

In an independent study of millions of shopper referrals from search engines, WebSideStory, Inc. today announced that AOL’s search service has the best referral-to-order conversion ratio among major search engines this year. AOL’s search service topped the list with a conversion ratio of 3.03 percent, according to the study. Yahoo and Google, the two largest search engines in terms of referring traffic volume, ranked 9th and 10th in the conversion study respectively.

The study is based on 29 million search engine visits to dozens of e-commerce sites using WebSideStory’s outsourced HitBox services. As a group, the e-commerce sites used in the study sell a broad range of products and services, everything from gifts and electronics to shoes and office equipment. The search engine visits include those generated by both paid search keywords and organic listings. All orders resulting from search engine visits were generated in the same session. The study does not include shopping-specific search engines.

“This is extremely interesting data that confirms something smart marketers have known for a while: That AOL members are more likely to buy,” said Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder of Future Now Inc., a New York City marketing firm specializing in online conversions and the authors of a new report that analyzes WebSideStory’s search engine conversion data in more detail.

The order conversion rankings are quite different than StatMarket’s global referring search engine rankings, which show Google as the top referring search engine on the Web, followed by Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

A complete analysis and ranking of the top converting search engines is available exclusively through a new report, “Converting Search Engine Traffic,” authored by Future Now, Inc. To get more information about ordering this report, go to www.StatMarket.com.

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