Organic search continues to grow as a channel, accounting for nearly 17.53% of customers acquired in the first half of 2013, according to the study, led by data scientist Aaron Goodman.
E-mail has more than quadrupled its share of customer acquisition volume over the last four years, making it the fastest-growing among all the channels tracked in the study.
Other search-related channels also performed well.
Social media ranked low as a customer-generation channel. That said, Facebook is showing some potential. In 2009, less than .01% of new online retail customers came from Facebook, compared to .17% so far this year.
Twitter has never accounted for more than .01% of new retail customers during the five-year study. Worse, a Twitter customer’s lifetime value was 23% less than the average across all customer sources