Our 2012 Marketers Benchmark Report was created for B2B marketers like you. We gathered data by looking at over 62 million visits, 215 million pageviews, and 350,000 leads from more than 600 small and medium-sized B2B websites. We hope this report helps you assess your current marketing efforts to see what is working and where you can make improvements.
On of the first trends we saw from the report is the clear cyclicality in the B2B space with first quarter of 2012 and from September to mid-November, showing the strongest performance in terms of traffic.
Q1 (January-March) and September to mid- November are the peak seasons, while summer time and the end-of-year exhibit slow traffic trends.
Organic Search is the #1 driver of traffic to B2B websites, followed by direct traffic (40%) and referrals (11.50%). Despite the increased adoption of social media by B2B in 2012, itʼs still only a fraction (1.90%) of total traffic to B2B websites.
Similarly to the traffic breakdown, the top three sources of leads are direct (34%), organic search (26.50%) and referrals (12.50%). However, the relative lead conversion rate between sources is very different with paid search and email contributing proportionally more leads than their traffic share.
The average conversion rate among all B2B websites in the report, across all sources is 1.60%. Email shows the highest conversion rate compared to all other sources. 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.
Just over 3 pageviews per visit seems to be the standard for most sources, with email proving to be a strong source for conversion rate as well as engagement. Social media once again is at the bottom of the list with the lowest engagement levels followed by paid search.
If this data sounds similar to your 2012, I’d love to hear about it! If you saw drastically different trends, I’d love to hear what marketing programs you are running and their performance relative to each other. You can download the full 2012 Marketers Benchmark Report here.