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Big Brands Dominate Jewelry Web Traffic, But Luxury Independents Gain Traction | October 14, 2015 (0 comments)
New York, NY—While we at Karus Chains specialize in classically-styled silver and gold chains for men, we blog about all aspects of men's jewelry. The majority of our posts detail our favorite jewelry accessories, designers and trends, but every now and then we have a look at the business side of jewelry, with a specific focus on online jewelry.
When we published our report on the top 10 online jewelry brands based on Google searches, we got a fantastic response from people within the industry. One of the people who responded asked if we could undertake some research on the most popular online jewelry sites and so that it exactly what we have done.
As you may recall, Pandora topped the list of jewelry brands by search. In our report that measured the top 10 jewelry brands based on Google searches, Pandora drew over 30 million annual searches for the brand.
In this article we look at the top 10 jewelry websites based on monthly traffic figures (not on revenue). Once we had gathered the data and determined the top 10, we then examined other interesting data including the amount of social traffic each of the top 10 gets, average time on site per visitor and the bounce rate.
Click here to find out the methods that we employed to get the data as well as all other research-related information. Important note: we are by no means experts on the criteria that are used to measure the top 10, nor are we well versed in Google Analytics. So while there may be a small bit of speculation/explanation as to the how and why of some of the results, for the most part we just let the figures do the explaining.
No real surprise here that Pandora is number one again. Until we undertook our research we were totally unaware of the jewelry retailer that comes in at number two, the Russian site Love-Sl.ru. Also new to us is Apart.pl based in Poland and coming in at number eight.
While we had heard of Brilliant Earth, we were surprised to see that it made it into the top 10m ahead of bigger jewelry retailers and brands like Jared, Helzberg, Ross-Simons and Cartier. However, as we'll see in the next graph, one of the reasons why Brilliant Earth has managed to leap frog the bigger brands and retailers could be down to a very successful social media strategy.
Share of traffic from social media is still in its infancy but it is obviously growing in importance. What we can see from the top 10 is that Brilliant Earth is way ahead of the others with a whopping 14.94% of their traffic coming from their various social channels. We decided to dig a bit deeper into this and found that over 85% of this traffic comes from their Facebook and Pinterest accounts.
Love-Sl. comes in a distant second but is still well ahead of the chasing pack. What is fascinating about their social traffic figures is that 90% of it comes from two Russian based social networks that we've never heard of: VK.com and Odnoklassniki.ru.
While the remainder of the top 10 may seem to have relatively low numbers of traffic coming from their social networks, most of them are still ahead of the average. A recent report by BI Intelligence shows that e-commerce sites on average get about 1.5% of their traffic from social networks and this figure is growing at a very fast rate.
The time visitors spend on your site is obviously a very good indication in measuring how engaged your visitors are with your store. Therefore it is no surprise that JTV.com wins this category hands down. JTV.com is more than just a website—it's an online channel that allows you to watch JTV live. Video/live streaming is what the experts call "sticky content;" it keeps visitors engaged for longer.
All of the top 10 sites perform very well when compared to the eCommerce average of 3.49 minutes. There are still big differences between the remaining top 10. Why do Pandora visitors stay 3 minutes longer than Zales or Brilliant Earth visitors? There's no obvious explanation and there could be numerous reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of offering.
However one thing we do know is that the metrics for the average time on site is influenced by a website’s bounce rate and what we see in the next chart is that Brilliant Earth and Zales have high bounce rates.
The technical definition of bounce rate from Google is, “Bounce rate is the percentage of visits that go only one page before exiting a site.” And while the bounce rates for the top 10 online jewelry retailers may at first appear high, most of them are very much within the average.
The average bounce rate for eCommerce sites is 35% and seven of the top 10 beat this average. Zales and Blue Nile are just above the average while Brilliant Earth, at 44%, is the worst performing in this category.
Brilliant Earth is the highest performing site in terms of social media traffic by a very large distance, yet has the lowest average time on site and the highest bounce rate. Is there a connection between these various elements? Does Brilliant Earth's social media success have an impact on time on site and bounce rate?
Probably—but maybe not in a negative way. Here's our theory: as Brilliant Earth get a lot of traffic from their social media sites, their visitors are clicking on a particular item that they see on Brilliant Earth's Pinterest or Facebook pages. This then brings the visitors to a landing page with the particular product. A lot of these visitors are not there to browse the site, they just want to look at the particular product that they've seen on Facebook/Pinterest. So most of these visitors will have a quick look at the product details. A small percentage will buy the product, and a small percentage might bookmark the page for later while the remainder will quickly exit the site.
This is only a theory and there are a multiple of other factors that are likely to have an impact on all of these criteria, including mobile usage and site design.
What is especially surprising is Apart.pl's bounce rate of just 19%. We had a good look at their site and couldn't see any obvious reasons behind a low bounce rate. One possible explanation could be that they have a very large and loyal audience that is familiar with their site, so most of their visitors are repeat customers who are unlikely to bounce right out of the site.
How independent jewelers fare. While the 76 sites we studied are heavily weighted toward bigger brands, retailers, and e-tailers, seven luxury independent jewelers have traffic numbers high enough to land on the list: Both Boston, MA-based Long’s Jewelers and JR Dunn of Lighthouse Point, FL have 15,000 unique monthly visitors on their websites. Long’s, in particular, gets 2.6% of their traffic from social media channels. This might not sound like much, but it’s well ahead of the e-commerce average of 1.5%. What’s also particularly interesting is that Long’s gets about one-quarter of those visits from YouTube. Here is one of their most popular bridal videos, with over 10,000 views of its own.
Other well-performing luxury independent jewelers include Princeton, NJ-based Hamilton (9,000 unique visitors per month), Omaha, NE-based Borsheims (8,000 unique visitors per month), Columbus, OH-based Diamond Cellar (5000), Louisiana-based Lee Michaels (4,000), and Washington, DC-based Tiny Jewel Box (3,000). 3000 is the minimum needed to show up in the rankings.
Research Methods. We used Similar Web to gather all of the information for this article. In a recent article published by the excellent Rand Fishkin of Moz.com, Similar Web came out on top in terms of the accuracy of it's traffic data. We are only able to measure traffic that goes directly to the main url. As a result we are not able to report the number of visitors to the jewelry sections of popular retail websites like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Barney's, Macy's etc. As with our previous research articles we excluded brands and retailers that are exclusively focused on watches, as they would dominate the results. A total of 76 retailers were measured for this article, including the independent jewelers named above. Click here to view the rankings of the sites.