British Retail "Egg-specting" a Strong Easter Online

This year Easter arrives in the first week of April and even if you don’t sell chocolate eggs or confectionary there are still significant opportunities for retailers. Research by the British Retail Consortium revealed that last year’s April retail sales grew 6.3% from the same period in 2008, with Easter driving a large proportion of growth in the non-food and apparel industries [1]. YoY non-food sales grew 12.5% from April 2008 for all non store related sales [1].

As expected the Gifts & Greetings industry sees a sharp seasonal rise in searches for Easter related cards and gifts following Valentine’s Day and Mothers Day.


Source: Google Insights for Search, ‘Easter’ in Gifts & Greetings UK web search in Mar - Apr 2009.

Easter is also a key period for the Home & Garden category. Last year consumers seemed to make the most of their four day weekend by investing in home comforts rather than travelling abroad. In the four week run up to the holiday period total sales for DIY stores and garden centres rose by 18% while spending on airlines and hotels declined [2].

Typically, last year’s Easter bank holiday weekend represented the peak of search interest for the Home and Garden category and was its busiest period for 2009.


Source: Google Insights for Search, Home & Garden category web search in Mar - Apr 2009.

The apparel industry also sees a substantial rise in traffic over the Easter weekend as users look for the first bargains of the Easter sales as well as the new season’s fashions. Last year overall clothing sales saw their highest growth for the month of April since 2006 [3].


Source: Google Insights for Search, Clothing Retailers category web search in Mar - Apr 2009.

So how can you make sure you capitalize on the Easter opportunity and generate maximum sales? We recommend the following:

• Be sure to plan and budget effectively for the seasonal spike in traffic in order to maximise my coverage and sales.
• Where appropriate add Easter themed keywords to your campaigns and ensure your entire product range is covered.
• Be sure to update your ad texts to reflect the Easter season and highlight special offers that you might be running. To make your ads even more relevant use the Keyword Insertion formula.
• Keep your negative keywords up to date in order to ensure receive the most relevant traffic.
• Be sure to have landing pages that bring users directly to the page related to their search query.

[1] Internet Retailing, May 2009
[2] Albemarle Interim Management Group
[3] BBC News, 12 May 2009

Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team

I Will Be Getting a Better TV for the World Cup… When I Can Afford It!

Many retailers have been asking us about the anticipated impact of the 2010 World Cup and what they should do online to capture the sales inertia created by the tournament.

Well in short, we believe that the typical sectors like Audio Visual, Groceries and Home Appliances (including BBQs, mini fridges etc) will be leading the charge (especially if the weather holds up!). However, thinking about what businesses should do to capitalise on this opportunity presents further questions. Namely, will there be a shift in search behaviour in the lead up to this year’s tournament?

Looking at the below extract from Insights for Search we can see that the top rising search terms during Oct’09 (what could be considered as a reasonable reflection of a consumer’s research period) are all fairly generic. They reflect how the British public like researching consumer electricals online while looking for a bargain with modifiers such as “sale” and “deals” being thrown into the mix.


(Google Insights for Search, October 2009)

In contrast, when we look at the top rising searches within the same category in the run-up to the 2006 tournament there is a marked difference in what people were searching for. The top six rising searches were all TV product codes:


(Google Insights for Search, May '06 - June '06)

This implies that just before the last World Cup consumers were clearer on what they wanted and a few front runners became the most searched TVs among Google users in the UK! For TV manufacturers, wouldn’t this be great news if it was your products? If you are a retailer how much would you want these purchases to come through your store?

Below we can see the top terms from March’06 – Apr’06. While there are a few “break out” searches for champion products such as the Panasonic Viera th42px60 (“The best Viera so far, and a superb use of plasma technology”[1), there are also many generic/research type keywords like “HDTVs”, and leading brands such as “Bravia” and “Samsung”. What is interesting to note is the lack of “cheap” or “deal” related search terms at this point.


(Insights for Search Mar '06 - Apr '06)

It is also interesting to look at when the major Home Video spike in interest occurred:


(Google insights for search May ’06 – June’06)

Category interest was highest on the last weekend of the month, presumably after everyone had been paid. While we are missing conversion data, we would be confident that sales would have followed a similar pattern (online and off). Against type there is a spike in interest on a Saturday and in our experience only key shopping events like Christmas - and of course England being in the World Cup! - influence the UK’s weekly search patterns like this.

While it is not that surprising to think that most people are likely to purchase a product once they have been paid, what is interesting is that it seems many will have already considered what products they want to buy.

… So what are the implications of these trends ahead of this year’s World Cup? If you are a manufacturer then make sure people know about your TVs asap. Display advertising could be one solution. If you are a retailer, advertising on all relevant keywords at the various stages of the purchasing funnel will help ensure that you influence consumers, so when they are ready to make that all important purchase they think of your goods!

[1] cnet UK, 7th April 2006

Posted by Alastair Stirling, UK Retail Team

Going Mobile with Online Retail

The increasing rate at which consumers are adopting internet-enabled mobile devices and the proliferation of smart phones has caused content providers to increase not only the breadth of mobile media offerings but also the level of interactivity and utility. In March 2008, Forrester Research predicted that 125 million Western Europeans will have access to internet-enabled mobile devices by 2013 [1], and according to eMarketer 34% of smartphone users have used web search, as opposed to 12% of total mobile phone users [2]. Out of total Retail Google quires 7% are now coming through mobile devices and are growing 100% YoY[3]. These figures are impressive. As this growth trend continues, media providers, e-commerce players and other publishers must adjust to the changing reality and optimise user experience accordingly. There are a few things that online retailers could do today to accommodate changes in mobile landscape.

1. Optimise your landing page for mobile in order to improve consumer experience and facilitate browsing on your site. Use webmaster tools to optimise your website to the m. format. . Whenever a user requests Google.com on a smart phone, we serve an optimised m.google.com webpage. Google has topped a list of top 10 UK mobile website ranked by unique users [3], and driving traffic from the engine to an optimised site, may result in improved conversion rate.

2. Take advantage of Geo targeting on mobile in order to drive relevant, localised customers to your site. This option can be particularly successful for Retailers offering Click and Collect services. In addition, eMarketer [4] predicts roaming charges to come down, which will allow consumers to more easily navigate to retail stores while abroad.

3. One effective way to understand whether mobile is a beneficial acquisition channel and the behaviour of mobile consumers for a given brand, product or service, is to separate desktop and mobile AdWords campaigns. This set-up will allow you to optimise your keyword base for mobile searches as users search differently on mobile. Mobile queries are much shorter and more generic due to limitation posed by the size of the device. According to Nielsen Ratings as cited by eMarketer [5], click through rates in mobile retail can be very high therefore more customised, personal ads may provide a further boost to CTR and conversions.

4. If relevant, use Click-to-call in your mobile ads or carrier target your ads, should you prefer to target users that use a specific mobile phone network.

With Amazon recently launching service to allow purchases from other websites using their Amazon credentials, the proliferation of m-commerce might happen sooner than expected [6]. M-commerce popularity has been studied by Motorola in 11 countries, where 51% of consumers using mobile phones during the Christmas holiday for comparison shopping, reviews, product information as well as coupons. This percentage was 64% amongst younger shoppers [7]. December saw a spike in Google queries, as people were likely to be comparing prices between Online and High Street [8].

Not unlike other channels, mobile campaigns require testing. We recommend starting your mobile campaign early so that you are equipped with robust performance data to facilitate a more informed response to user browsing habits as usage of smart phone continues to grow. Understanding mobile browsing behaviour and propensity to convert should help you optimise mobile campaigns for peak times such as Mother’s Day, Easter or any other relevant seasonal peak as well as to your target demographic.

We hope that you found these tips useful. Please email us if you have any questions or feedback.

[1] eMarketer March 2009 and April 2009
[2] eMarketer – UK Mobile Internet. February 2009
[3] Google Internal
[4] eMarketer – UK Mobile Internet. February 2009
[5] eMarketer – UK Mobile Internet. February 2009
[6] Online Media Daily. Amazon Extends Payment Service to Mobile Devices
[7] M-retailing. from Internet Retailing Multichannel - 2010/1/18
[8] Google Internal



Posted by Anna Prolejko, UK Retail Team