The lesser-spotted Slow Tail

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Jakob Nielsen spots another-shaped Tail, this time the lesser-spotted Slow Tail, referring to the conversion time for buyers to complete a transaction after their initial visit to a website:

"A full 5% of orders occur more than four weeks after users click on search engine ads.

...Although 75% of the conversions occurred within 24 hours, the last quarter took much longer to arrive. Orders didn't reach the 90% mark until 12 days after users had clicked on the advertisement, and it took four weeks to reach 95%. Thus, the last 5% of orders happened more than four weeks after the initial click.

The following chart shows the days required to reach a certain percentage of the ultimate conversions."

  Percentile chart showing delay in orders, especially for the last 20% of sales (after the 80th percentile).

Via Lawrence Lee.