Study: B2B Websites Generated 124 Leads Each per Month in 2012
Email remains a mainstay for marketers and is outperforming social media, its sexier cohort.
Also, paid search is seeing a decline in usage by B2B marketers, and Twitter is the king of social media when it comes to lead generation. These are some of the main findings of Optify’s “2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report.”
Overview
According to Optify, the first quarter of 2012 (January-March) was a busy season in terms of traffic to B2B websites, while September to mid-November was also another peak season for the space. Summertime and the end of the year were much quieter.
Organic search drove 41.0 percent of traffic to B2B websites in 2012, while direct traffic accounted for 40.0 percent of the mix and referrals accounted for 11.5 percent. Paid search accounted for 4.7 percent of traffic, followed by social media with 1.9 percent, email with 0.8 percent and other sources with 0.1 percent.
Direct traffic accounted for 34.0 percent of leads in 2012, followed by organic search with 26.5 percent, referrals with 12.5 percent, paid search with 10.5 percent, email with 9.0 percent, social media with 4.8 percent and other sources with 2.8 percent. Optify notes that paid search and email contribute proportionally more leads than their traffic share.
The average conversion rate for B2B websites in 2012 was 1.6 percent. Email led the pack with a 2.9 percent conversion rate, followed by referrals with 2.0 percent, paid search with 12.0 percent, direct traffic with 1.7 percent, organic search with 1.5 percent and social media with 1.2 percent.
“Surprisingly, organic search, the #1 driver of traffic, is at the bottom of the conversion rate list, second only to social media among the sources with the lowest conversion rates,” according to Optify.
The average page views per visit was 3.0 across all sources. Email led the way here as well, with an average page views per visit of 3.8, followed by direct traffic with 3.2, organic search with 3.0, referrals with 3.0, paid search with 2.7 and social media with 2.0.
Benchmarks
According to Optify, the median visits per month for B2B websites was 1,784, while the median leads per month was 124. Meanwhile, the median page views per visit (monthly average) was 3.0, and the median conversion rate (monthly average) was 1.6 percent.
Organic search
Unsurprisingly, Google was the big leader when it came to driving organic search traffic to B2B websites. Optify notes that Google drove an average of 88.2 percent of organic traffic to these sites in 2012 and displayed a steady increase during the year. Bing averaged 6.0 percent of organic search traffic to B2B websites, while other search engines averaged 5.9 percent of organic search traffic to these sites during 2012.
Google drove more traffic and leads, but Bing boasted a better conversion rate (1.9 percent vs. 1.6 percent for Google) and more page views per visit (3.3 vs. 2.9).
Optify also offers a glimpse into the “(not provided)” rate. For the uninitiated, here’s Optify’s explanation:
“(not provided)” is the value Google assigns to the referring keyword of visitors from organic search when they are using Google’s secured search (SSL
