All marketers should now be aware that mobile is increasingly overshadowing desktop in many areas, and it seems retail searches during Christmas is one of them.
Retail searches on mobile are expected to increase by at least 500% over the Christmas weekend alone.
As the year draws to a close, here’s some final advertiser inspiration to make those ad budgets work harder.
Black Friday is less than half a week away, which means it’s almost time to forget about the woes of the world for one day and get lost in some good-old-fashioned consumerist escapism.
In light of this being the UK’s biggest 24 hours for ecommerce and what with us being a digital marketing blog, we thought we’d better bring you some of the best Black Friday stats we’ve seen so far.
Click and collect felt inescapable this December.
Just on my half hour walk to work I would see multiple ads for eBay’s partnership with Argos, John Lewis and Tesco promoting their click and collect services on bus stops and in shop windows.
There used to be an unspoken rule about the Christmas retail season that any ads would only begin after Bonfire Night was over. After that, the deluge began.
Unusually for today’s society, this particular season is getting longer not shorter, as advertisers and retailers inculcate in consumers the idea that Halloween is now the time when the floodwaters are unleashed.
Christmas now begins on November 1st, Hark the Herald Angels Sing! But for online retailers it comes even earlier because of the seasonal gravity of that time of year.
A bad Christmas in the age of algorithms and customer acquisition extends beyond revenues and margins; it probably spells the end.
Recent research from Ometria bears this out on data it accumulated from comparing last year’s Christmas with the first ten months of this year.
Christmas is always a busy time of year, so it comes as no surprise that consumers turn to ecommerce for a convenient way to get their shopping done.
A new Econsultancy survey found that in the UK a majority of people (61%) said that they completed more than half or all of their Christmas shopping online in 2013, while just 7% completed all of their shopping offline.
In the US the results were similarly slanted in favour of ecommerce with 50% of respondents completing more than half of their Christmas shopping online.
However US consumers were also twice as likely to solely rely on brick-and-mortar stores, as 16% said they didn’t do any shopping online.
The findings come from the second annual Econsultancy Christmas 2013 Online Shopping Survey Report, which interviewed 2,000 US and UK consumers in January using Toluna QuickSurveys.
Christmas shopping can be a painful experience, particularly when you find yourself in a busy shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon facing huge crowds and massive queues.
So it probably comes as no surprise to hear that levels of satisfaction with online shopping improve slightly during the festive season, while the opposite is true for the in-store experience.
A survey by eDigitalResearch found that a quarter (25%) of shoppers feel that online shopping experiences improve at Christmas, while 42% of respondents stated that their overall in-store experience deteriorated at this time of year.
Improved satisfaction is mainly down to the lack of queues (53%), but price (51%) and the range of products available online (51%) are also seen as key benefits of ecommerce.
We all know that Christmas is a huge season for retailers, but it’s also a big deal for affiliate marketers.
Bloggers everywhere are starting to reveal their site content for the holiday season: what we should wear, what we could cook and what we must buy our children.
For content affiliate sites, seasonal content is perfect for advertising Christmas gifts and related products. According to stats from Experian Hitwise, online shopping over Christmas 2012 was the busiest ever, with almost 200m visits on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day alone.
This is only going to increase as we move towards December.
Winter is here and the Christmas decorations are out in full force.
According to the BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor, online sales over Christmas 2012 were up by almost 20% compared to the year before as almost 60% of people did most of their Christmas shopping online.
Now that consumers are increasingly using smartphones and tablets to shop, we will no doubt see an even greater surge in online Christmas shopping in 2013.
Christmas is coming and the geese are getting fat. OK, so it’s still relatively warm outside, but as we move into autumn, it’s time to start thinking about the holiday season.
Christmas is still the biggest shopping season for retailers and getting the holiday marketing campaigns, pricing and online strategy just right takes time.
Plus, once the sales hit it’s crucial to be able to shift any surplus seasonal goods.
Nearly a quarter (24%) of UK consumers used a mobile device for Christmas shopping, according to stats included in our new Christmas 2012 Online Shopping Survey.
The report, which was produced using Toluna QuickSurveys, polled 1,000 UK and 1,000 US online consumers on their shopping habits.
It revealed that 11% of UK respondents used a smartphone and 13% used a tablet, compared to 77% who shopped using a desktop.
US shoppers exhibited largely similar shopping behaviours, though overall were 4% more likely to use a smartphone or tablet for their Christmas shopping.