Ecommerce Marketing Benchmarking Report 2023 from HawkeAI

2022 was a wild journey for ecommerce businesses, regardless of size or industry. At times, economists were screaming from the rooftops that it was all falling apart, but the year ended with trendlines moving in the right direction. As paid media struggled to keep up with changing privacy restrictions and increased competition, other digital marketing services have risen up. To see how your marketing benchmarking stacks up, you’ve got to compare to the ecommerce industry writ large.

That’s why we’ve created the Annual Ecommerce Data Benchmark Report. Powered by HawkeAI and in partnership with Digital Marketer, we’ve aggregated data from 1000s of ecommerce businesses in Meta, Google, TikTok, and more to help you understand how your business stacks up to your competitors in 2022, and how you should be prepared for 2023.

Here’s a taste of what you’ll discover:

• Average Order Value (AOV) was up 31% in 2022.
• There was a 35% increase in transactions from affiliate marketing.
• Advertisers spent 47% more on Pinterest than the year before… and there was another social media channel with even higher growth.
• Website sessions were down 6% overall in 2022 in response to the perceived economic uncertainty.

This annual report will guide you through all the trends that started in 2022 and will define 2023. Don’t get left behind. Here’s a preview of what’s inside:

Web Analytics & Organic Channels

Despite the increase in paid media that we discuss below, sessions YoY were within 2% of last year’s total. This indicates that the spend did not have a significant impact on overall traffic.

Goals

Goal completion rates as well were also down about 10%, which indicates that the increased spend and re-allocation of budget did not necessarily lead to higher quality traffic hitting the site.

Email Marketing

A B2B favorite for marketing is email, of course. We did see a 13% increase in sessions that came from email, but a goal completion rate that declined by 25%. If the goal of email marketing is to generate brand awareness and engagement with the content that you are sharing (e.g. monthly newsletters, product updates, etc) then mission accomplished for B2B marketers this year, from a loyalty and engagement standpoint email worked!

If you were trying to use email marketing to get prospects to fill out a lead gen form or activate a trial, then overall, that is not what email performance was delivered.

Organic Search

Organic search was a similar story in some regards, we saw an improving bounce rate on organic search sessions, so people were finding the content they wanted more often and engaging with it, but goal completion
rate for organic search was down. Again, that ‘goal completion’ may not be the objective and with long sales cycles, etc it is tough to conclude on this but from a direct attribution perspective of someone read a blog and then signed up to be pitched services was not happening as frequently as I’m sure some marketers would like.

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