Site search conversion data from Coremetrics
April 14th, 2008 Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.
This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.
As to the question around the value of the benchmarks - I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.

