Enterprise fashion retailers account for 24% visits: Nosto

The research tracked all traffic sources based on ‘last click’. The study focused on three key metrics: number of site visits, purchases, and order value, and the data was broken out by mobile and desktop devices.

“Social sites such as Facebook and Instagram are important destinations for branding and product discovery, especially in the fashion space. You can’t judge their full power only by looking at the last click from either paid or unpaid sources that are driving visitors to merchants’ stores. Instagram in particular is an extremely popular platform on which shoppers follow fashion influencers to learn about new styles and brands, but that higher-funnel discovery process won’t show up in e-commerce marketers’ website analytics data,” said Jim Lofgren, CEO of Nosto.

“The modern e-commerce fashion shopping journey is highly complex, and more often than not the shopper finally arrives at a retailer’s site by heading there directly or via Google search. This continues to pose challenges for e-commerce brands trying to evaluate the ROI of their marketing spend,” added Lofgren.

While organic and paid social appear to generate 9 per cent of all traffic to enterprise fashion e-commerce based on the last click model, the full impact of social is likely to be significantly greater.

Nosto’s examination of the direct impact of social media on enterprise fashion e-commerce reveals that of the four main social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat) Facebook and Instagram are the biggest drivers of traffic and orders from paid and organic social. Within paid social, Facebook accounts for 73 per cent of all traffic. In organic social, Facebook represents 53 per cent of traffic.

Instagram generates 41 per cent of all organic social traffic. On the paid social side, Instagram generates 16 per cent of all traffic.

Of the other social networks, both Snapchat and Pinterest account for 3 per cent each of direct organic social traffic. However orders resulting directly from organic Pinterest and Snapchat activity based on the last click are negligible. In paid social Snapchat drives 10 per cent of traffic and 1 per cent of orders, implying a stronger branding and awareness value currently.

Aside from search and social, the study reveals visits and transactions for enterprise fashion e-commerce sites are either generated by direct traffic (when shoppers directly type the e-commerce site’s web address into their phones and computers); from sources such as marketing emails, ad networks and affiliate sites; or from dark social (mostly from people sharing links to the e-commerce sites in emails, text messages and messaging apps).

Nosto’s fashion retail customers include Gymshark, Agent Provocateur, Aquascutum, Everlast, Helly Hansen and Volcom. (PC)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India