Shopping KPI Survey: Upsells—What percentage of sales result in upsells?

The Search Monitor recently conducted a survey to aggregate performance metrics for shopping campaigns on Google, Bing and Amazon.

Shopping engines don’t publish any directional stats, and few research papers have been published on this topic. Therefore, benchmarking and goal setting for shopping campaigns is challenging. That’s why we took on the task of anonymously aggregating the top most requested KPI’s, including CTR, Conversion Rate, and ROAS for advertisers running shopping campaigns on Google, Amazon and Bing.

Question:

What percentage of sales result in upsells?

Highlights

Upselling and cart add-ons is a tool for driving incremental and impulse purchases once customers are in the shopping cart. It extends the concept of upsells and cross-sells at the product level, and engages customers at the moment they are most likely to increase spending.

The key to upselling is that you offer products that add value based on the buyer’s selected items.

Over half of survey respondents either don’t offer upsells or see less than 10% of shoppers adding additional items to their shopping cart after selecting a product from an ad.

There are two possible reasons for this—cart set-up and user behavior:

• Cart set-up: 30% of survey respondents indicated they do not offer upsells. This is a missed opportunity to increase order size and revenue. Don’t assume the shopping cart page means the shopper has finished and is ready to checkout. You should always show cross-sell items, especially on cart views. Adding product recommendations based on in-cart products adds another layer of interest for buyers and helps add value to their buying experience. Studies show that placing recommendations in the cart garner higher conversions versus carts that don’t have recommendations.
• User behavior: If a shopper is searching for a specific product and they find what they are looking for through an ad, they may proceed directly to checkout, complete their purchase and move on. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to improve upsell opportunities on the website and in-cart.

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