The fact that many paid search visitors come to the website multiple times from multiple sources is well known, but solid stats about this aspect of user behavior are hard to come by. I’m down at the Channel Intelligence Retail Summit in Orlando, and they’ve just shared some interesting related data.

The following numbers are based on data CI collects from hundreds of manufacturers, retailers, and shopping comparison engines. From within that world, these are the number of people who used different shopping channels/sources before their purchase.

1. One Channel Before Purchase – 37%
2. Two Channels Before Purchase – 25%
3. Three Channels Before Purchase – 16%
4. Four Channels Before Purchase – 8%
5. Five or More Channels Before Purchase – 14%

Two things to note:

• Each visit through an email, organic or paid search, shopping comparison engine, or retailer site counts as a channel visit. In other words, if you came through two different shopping engines those are counted as two different channels in the above list even though they’re the same channel.
• This data does not document the number of visits to a single website. A user who went through four channels to four different sites before purchasing is in the ‘Four Channels’ data.

This is really interesting data, and generates a lot of thoughts on the issue of attribution. More thoughts on that in a future post.