What channels to choose?

An average webshop in Europe advertises on more than 20 channels. These include multiple search engines and comparison sites, affliate networks, market places and display networks. From a survey of 129 Dutch webshops in 2010, it appears that Adwords is still favored, followed directly by comparison shopping engines:

In other European countries the channel share of Adwords is lower (Adwords < 10%). That is because of the higher Adwords costs in large mature markets, like France and Germany. Many merchants are therefore looking for alternatives such as retargeting, marketplaces and result-oriented display campaigns.

SEO is also considered to be an important traffic source. Many orders that Google Analytics cannot assign to Adwords, are contributed to organic and direct results. In many cases these orders are also claimed by affiliate networks and other cps channels. By using Conversion Attribution in Shop2market you'll learn that many orders are not a result of organic search at all. The difference can be as big as 50%! So, organic in Google Analytics is not what it seems!