The breakdown of conversion rates based on traffic source is typical where direct traffic has a much higher conversion rate compared to the referring website or search engine traffic. This is because direct visitors recognize the brand and have some affinity to it. Thus, they are more likely to convert. In this example, direct traffic has a 75% higher conversion rate compared to other sources. Since the website receives a low percentage of its traffic from direct visitors and these visitors convert at a higher rate, this presents a possible opportunity for the site to focus on bringing more direct traffic to it.

Finally, let’s look at engagement metrics for the different traffic sources. The average time on the site for the different sources is comparable. Search traffic browses more pages on the site. It is typical for direct traffic to have a lower pages-per-visit ratio. Direct visitors are more familiar with the site and know how to navigate around it. The metric that should jump out at you is the higher bounce rate for direct and referring websites. Both of these sources show about a 40% increase in bounce rate compared to search traffic. That should be alarming. It is especially unusual for direct traffic to have a higher bounce rate compared to other sources of traffic. This represents a great opportunity to optimize landing pages.

Although overall search traffic converted at 1.73%, there are large differences in conversion rates based on the search engine, as shown in Table 2-9. Google, which drives 92% of the search traffic, converts at 1.69% compared to Bing, which only drives 3.60% of the search traffic yet converts at 2.30%. Does that mean Bing provides higher-quality traffic? It is difficult to conclude this with the current data. You could assume that since Bing drives a lot less traffic, the quality of these visitors will naturally be better compared to Google. This is not necessarily the case. We do notice there is a point where bringing more visitors to a site drives down the quality of conversions.