I was recently analyzing the long term affects of adding a product catalog to a website. The analysis showed that over a 12 month period, the organic visitor traffic to the website increased 66%. This was a sustainable increase without any other work than adding the catalog. The catalog has more than 1000 individual items with at least 1 photograph and a description of at least 50 words. Those 1000 products were all from well know designer brand and each product description and product title were unique. That 66% organic visitor increase was found when comparing the website from the last 12 months of December 2012 - November 2013 the same period from 2011 - 2012.
Adding a product catalog to your website is certainly a big undertaking, but it's well worth it over the long term.
During the holiday season, those product catalogs are a huge visitor magnet for your store. I've measured some numbers to explain exactly how huge this magnet is. To make it simple, I've compared the 17 day period from November 28, 2013 (Thanksgiving) through December 14, 2013 to a 17 day span in October 2013.
313.15% - This is the percentage increase of organic visitors that are search for, and finding jewelry product catalogs.
296.36% - This is the percentage increase in new visitors to retail jewelry websites.
17.14% - This is the positive change in the bounce rate for the measured sites. The actual bounce rate went from 44.22% down to 36.64%. This means more people are willing to look around your website right now.
-10.89% - This is the negative change in the average pages every visitor is viewing. The pages per visit has dropped from 6.61 pages to 5.89 pages. This drop is understandable because, even though your bounce rate has dropped, customers are only willing to browse through a few pages before looking for your competition.
-75.16% - This is the negative change in the average visit duration. This is a drastic drop from an average of 17 minutes down to 4 minutes. This change also represents the season of faster browsing and the needs for immediate results.
Although these numbers seem pretty fantastic, let me compare them to the 17 day period starting from Thanksgiving 2012.
| 2013 Season vs. 2012 Season | |
| Organic Visits | 32.44% drop from 2012 |
| New Visits | 39.40% drop from 2012 |
| Bounce Rate | 48.16% improvement from 2012 |
| Pages/Visit | 63.92% improvement from 2012 |
| Avg. Visit Duration | 5.93% drop from 2012 |
It's always difficult to compare calendar days when dealing with fluctuating holiday dates, but it sure does seem like the number of visitors last year (2012) was higher than this year (2013).
Regardless how the sales for the season turn out, the bottom line of this Daily Golden Nugget to show how important an online jewelry catalog is for attracting organic traffic during the holiday season.
