Introduction
Visibility is central to attracting shoppers to an online store, but visits have different costs and purposes depending on where they begin. Product listings reach people comparing purchases; paid social reaches audiences beyond those listings; retargeting brings previous visitors back. The best way to increase ecommerce traffic is to combine those sources according to the shoppers they reach and the cost of the sales they generate.
Where does online store traffic come from, and which channels drive the most?
Online store traffic comes from paid shopping listings, search, social media and people returning to the store. The largest source depends on the store’s products, audience and existing customer base. A broad Contentsquare benchmark found that paid sources accounted for 33.8% of visits across 3,590 websites, but its sample covered multiple industries, not online stores alone.
That figure makes paid traffic a channel worth assessing, not a target share for your store. Start with your own traffic sources, then compare the orders each produces. A source that brings fewer visitors can still be the stronger choice if those visits generate sales at a sustainable cost.
How can you get more paid shopping or paid search traffic to your store?
Shopping listings put products in front of people who are already comparing what to buy. To drive traffic to an online store through them, keep product information up to date, select the products you want to promote and decide who will pay for the advertising. In a merchant-run Shopping campaign, you fund the ads yourself.
Our Managed Ads use our media budget to run Google Shopping, Bing Shopping Ads and Shoparize.com campaigns. You provide a product feed and pay an agreed commission on generated sales, rather than an upfront ad cost or a fee for clicks or impressions. That shifts the immediate cost from visits to attributed sales, although the commission still has to fit your product margins.
Our Comparison Shopping service is a separate route: shoppers compare products, prices and features on Shoparize.com before clicking through to buy in your store. It has a fixed monthly fee plus a sales commission; a referral without a purchase does not incur that commission, and returns and cancellations are excluded. The fixed fee makes expected sales volume important when assessing the service, even though individual nonbuying visits do not attract a commission.
For a merchant already running Google Shopping, our Premium CSS applies to the merchant’s own campaigns through a flat subscription without a sales commission. These are distinct cost models, not interchangeable versions of free traffic. Choose among them by comparing the total fees and advertising costs with the sales each route produces.
How can you retarget visitors who browse but don’t buy?
Retargeting uses ads to invite previous visitors back after they leave without purchasing. Unlike campaigns seeking new visitors, retargeting aims to turn the return visits of people who have already reached the store into orders.
Sales generated through our services take place in your own store, where you retain the customer relationship and order data. That gives you a basis for assessing what happens after a visitor arrives. For retargeting, count the sales following return visits and compare them with the ad cost; paying for another visit is justified by the resulting purchases, not by the visit itself.
Sales determine the value of store traffic
Paid shopping and comparison listings can bring purchase-minded shoppers to a store under different cost models, while paid social and retargeting add reach and return visits. The decisive measure is not which source produces the most traffic. It is which source produces sales at a cost the store can sustain, and continuous optimization keeps visits aligned with that outcome.
