Review: MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007

MarketingSherpa Benchmark guides are becoming increasingly comprehensive and detailed.

Their latest Ecommerce Benchmark Guide is almost 300 pages long, with 98% new content compared to last year’s version.

Best of all, in my view, is the huge scope of their data.

They didn’t just interview half a dozen site owners for this guide.

They surveyed 1,913 marketers from ecommerce web sites both large and small.

In addition, they surveyed 2,449 online shoppers and created heatmaps based on their shopping behaviors.

Finally, they drew additional data from more than 30 organizations, such as Coremetrics, comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings.

The result is a guide that includes 223 charts and tables and a great deal of analysis.

In other words, this is the most comprehensive collection of data you will find on the subject of ecommerce.

If you want to find the “benchmark” for any aspect of selling online, you’ll find it here.

How would you use such a guide?

First, use it as a benchmark against which to compare your own site or sites.

See where the norms lie on the subject of shopping cart abandonment, for example. Then take a look at the shopping cart abandonment rate from your own site and see how you stack up.

Find out how other marketers have made significant improvements to key metrics by working on their home pages, sales pages, shopping carts, emails and more.

Second, use it as a resource for new traffic-building strategies. Find out how other merchants have used PPC, SEO, email and online advertising to attract more and better qualified visitors.

Third, use it as a tool to set your own priorities over the next 12 months. Find out where the “low hanging fruit” is, and determine which aspects of your own site you should be optimizing first.

Fourth, use it to support and validate your budget and resource requests. This is the industry’s most respected benchmark document and will add enormous credibility to your requests for budgets and resources for key aspects of your online business.

Fifth, use it to learn. Each page reveals new facts and figures about what works and what doesn’t. You’ll learn dozens of new tricks and tactics to improve the performance of your site.

And those tricks and tactics may not be the ones you tried last year, or which even worked last years.

As always, the Internet as a commercial medium is changing fast. Which is what makes this document such an essential resource.

Concluding thoughts...

You’ll find a lot more detail about that the guide covers and contains on MarketingSherpa’s information page.

But for me, the core value here is the existence of this guide as a benchmark against which to measure our own sites.

The data has been drawn from such a wide and diverse range of sources, it gives us a unique perspective on every aspect of our own online marketing efforts, and highlights new opportunities to make improvements and increase conversion rates and revenues.

Find out more about the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Guide 2007 here...