According to a study by Engine Ready, a San Diego-based search marketing firm, visitors who come to a web site by directly typing in a URL or bookmark constitute the most valuable traffic for an online retailer. The result was based on a study of traffic to 27 retail sites for a period of 2 years and was analyzed in terms of four types of site visitors--direct access, referrals (via links from other Web sites or email), paid search and organic search traffic.

"Visitors arriving via direct access or a bookmark stay longer, view more pages, are more likely to purchase and more likely to spend a higher dollar amount than visitors from other sources," the report said.

Online retailers who have created brand loyalty among consumers through online and off-line advertising and other propaganda benefit the most out of direct access traffic as their URLs are imprinted in the minds of consumers.

These brand-driven consumers have a conversion rate of3.3% which is considered to be the highest. They spend just over $170 per order. Also, direct access visitors spent 312 seconds on-site per visit and viewed an average of six pages each time.

The second-most valuable visitors are the referred traffic, or consumers who arrived via a link from another Web site or email. They have a conversion rate of 3% and spend about $168 per order. These referral visitors also had the highest bounce rate owing to various reasons like incorrect offer in the referrer email and so on.

Though search traffic is less expensive to generate than brand-driven traffic, it was not appealing in terms of conversions or average order value. Paid search visitors converted 1.4% of the time, about 20% higher than organic search traffic. The average order value from both paid and organic search visitors was much lower than direct access traffic, at $138 and $117 per visit, respectively. The second-highest level of engagement was shown by organic search visitors who viewed an average of five pages per visit.

Different companies will have different online retail goals. But it is always good to have a holistic retail strategy that includes paid search, SEO (search engine optimization) and branding efforts.