Tracking Christmas Traffic

After you spend the time building Christmas specific campaigns, you want to know about the trends and spikes in Christmas traffic. If you are using Google Analytics, you can set up Intelligence Alerts to closely monitor important holiday shopping events. On November 27th, the Westend of London is being transformed into a traffic free zone for all of the Christmas shoppers to concentrate on shopping! This is a huge opportunity for potential customers to Research online purchase offline. Or they might see something in a store but it’s not available on that day so they return home to buy online.

It is really important to track these interesting traffic trends. Once you’ve set your code and tracking goals, you can set up proactive alerts to monitor spikes in traffic. With Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts you can not only track important shopping holiday events but Christmas specific keywords as well as an increase from new visitors or from a certain source.

If you receive an alert regarding a spike in Christmas keyword traffic, for example, you can really analyse this data even further to identify traffic trends.

Top Tips:

1. Make sure you are running ads for high traffic Christmas keyword terms.
2. Run an advanced segment report to obtain insight about the visitors. You can see if they are new or returning visitors.
3. If you have a number of new visitors it would be interesting to run a special promotion for new site visitors. 10% off your first purchase, for example. Always remember to use any special promotions in the ad text for a unique selling point.
4. To get your AdWords Campaigns ready for Christmas please visit our ‘Jingle All The Way’ Christmas site

Posted by Trish McGinty, Dublin Retail Team

Talking Retail: Views of Online Shopping in 2010

Our Google on the Street Team have been out and about again...This time, they have been talking to consumers about online shopping.

The team have tried to gain some insights into how consumers are using online as part of their research and purchase process.

Now that one in four UK mobile users owns a smartphone[1], we were also interested in looking into how consumers are using their mobiles to make purchases, if at all.

Watch our short video to find out the responses to questions around the following topics:

• How do consumers research products that they are interested in buying?
• What are the most important factors when shopping online?
• Are they using their mobile phones to make online purchases?
• What types of products are they purchasing online?
• What are the main frustrations that they encounter when trying to complete an online purchase?

[1]ComScore MobiLens, March 2010


Posted by Selina Rennie, Agency Team

think with Google: Inspiring Talks by Remarkable People

YouTube has long been a place to come to look for information and to connect with other people with similar interests. In the spirit of this, think with Google has been launched - Google UKs new platform for sharing business insights and viewpoints delivered in bite-sized, inspiring and actionable videos.

The channel has some of UKs leading retailers offering their insights on creativity, strategy, trends, consumer insights and more. Contributors already include Amazon’s Marketing Director Brian McBride, Confused.com’s CEO Carlton Hood, Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh and highlights from the think eCommerce events.



As always, viewers will be able to rate videos, leave comments, subscribe and offer up video responses. The hope is that this will become a thriving business community in the spirit of YouTube – so head to the channel, listen to the thinkers and feel free to make your voice heard.

Posted by Christoffer Klemming, UK Marketing Team

A trend that's set to stay in fashion...

While high street sales have borne the brunt of the economic downturn, fashion retailers have continued to see growth in their online web sales during 2008 and 2009.

Last year online fashion retailer ASOS reported a 104% increase in year on year sales. While during the intensely competitive Christmas trading period, Debenhams and M&S recorded 38% and 29% increases in online sales respectively.

In March this year the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index reported a stunning rise of 26% in sales of footwear, clothing and accessories. By May, however, sales growth had slowed to 8.2% regarded as a result of both recessionary effects and sunshine.

While online may not be completely impervious from the credit crunch the underlying trend in online fashion retail is still one of growth. The pressures on advertisers now are to ensure that their offerings remain competitive and their digital strategy is effective.

The combination of falling store sales, the Internet’s strength as a sales channel and the high level of research consumers conduct online means providing a compelling eCommerce presence is still very much a necessity.

Google Insights for Search shows strong year on year growth in search interest for leading fashion brands New Look, River Island, ASOS and Littlewoods. Meanwhile the popularity online of value retailers like Matalan, Primark and Peacocks is also shown to be on the up.

More growth online during 2009 still seems likely for fashion and apparel retailers despite the slowdown. With many high street fashion brands like Whistles, River Island and New Look recently having launched transactional websites plus Matalan and other value retailers - who previously shied away from the web - also getting to grips with the channel, the rise of online shopping appears to be a trend that is set to stay in fashion.

Posted by Brendan Patterson, UK Retail Team