The Path for Purchasers

These things take time. Although acquisition is far too often judged soon after the investment, real buying behavior makes the case for patience.

While 3% of new visitors advance to purchase, the process takes nearly a month, 27 days on average across ecommerce (per Braze). There are two significant lessons (or reminders for those already in the know).

First, turning browsers into buyers is not often immediate. Like bread-making, it takes time for buyers to rise. The good news: you have an opportunity to engage and re-engage with shoppers, and hopefully a chance to better connect your brand with the buyer’s needs (read: segment and personalize).

And second, make sure you are really understanding your acquisition sources, and how shoppers within those cohorts are behaving. Are some sources delivering buyers, though taking longer to do so? What post-acquisition messaging and flows are proving beneficial to advancing your browsers to buyers?

Of course averages are dangerous, especially when measuring time. An average may be far different from a median, and can skew to outlying data. Knowing your medians, ranges, and standard deviations are really helpful to measuring success or failure of time-based metrics, especially when judging attributes like acquisition source.