How a purchase decision is really made online
E-COMMERCE Tradedoubler has used its user journey technology to examine the online purchasing behavior of European consumers in detail. This reveals the often surprising paths that online shoppers take before making a purchase decision.
How do customers make their purchasing decisions online? A broad-based study provides insight.Based on the analysis of eight million online purchases, the data-driven insights also disprove widespread notions of purchasing behavior. As expected, weekend sales via desktop PCs decline - by around 11 percent. Purchases via smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, peak across Europe on these days: the likelihood of a smartphone being used to make a purchase is 20 percent higher on Saturday than on any other day of the week. Traditionally, consumers shop more in brick-and-mortar stores on Saturdays. The findings suggest that while they do browse in stores, they then make price comparisons and product purchases online. This shows how important it is to link online and offline marketing strategies.In addition, the user journey results provide insight into how much time passes before a purchase is completed online. Consumers take the longest time to buy games online. It takes an average of 17 days from the first click to the last, compared to fashion articles (14.8 days) or vacation and flight bookings (5.9 days). European consumers make one of the fastest online purchasing decisions with online dating offers: here, the European average is only 1.6 days until the purchase is completed. In Germany, it takes just 2 hours and 24 minutes to select and register for online dating platforms. Across Europe, it takes an average of just under 5 days and 24 clicks to make a purchase decision in e-commerce. Consumers in Germany are the most determined shoppers, taking just over five days (5.07 days) from first click to purchase completion, compared to the UK with an average of seven days (6.69 days), France (10.93 days) and Sweden (11.84 days), where the buying process takes the longest.Often, Europe's marketing departments mistakenly assume that cashback sites, for example, only get the last click on the online purchase path. User journey results dispel this myth: When a consumer purchases a product or service through a cashback website, 82 percent of those shoppers also began their user journey on a cashback site. Not only do cashback sites initiate numerous purchases, the purchases made there are also completed three times faster than the average online purchase.
Immo Hütte, Managing Director of Tradedoubler Switzerland: "For an advertiser in digital marketing, it is essential to include the entire user journey in their planning and analyses. Our insights show impressively that a consideration of only the last click often leads to wrong interpretations and decisions. The insights gained from the data collected enable a differentiated view of the various online channels and their value, a significantly more efficient use of budgets, and ultimately greater customer proximity. "User Journey is an essential component of Tradedoubler's business intelligence tool ADAPT. It provides marketers operating in an almost unmanageable, complex digital environment with the information they need to make effective decisions about targeting and ad spend - rather than relying on outdated marketing theories.
