The major snowstorm on the East Coast on Saturday and Sunday lifted online sales for 67% of PM Digital’s retail clients an estimated 10% vs. what they would have seen for the weekend without the storm. For the apparel category, specifically, this lift affected 71% of PM Digital clients.
The strong weekend results for online sales is icing on the cake to a strong overall holiday season for ecommerce. As has been reported by comScore and others, online sales are up year over year in 2009 vs. 2008, so there is a lot to celebrate.
Some of the key drivers in lifting sales this year in particular were 1) promotions; 2) gift cards; 3) egift cards) 4) accurate forecasting (running budgets high on the best days and scaling back on lower-converting days), and 5) taking advantage of best practices in search strategies.
Overall, we’ve seen larger retail budgets in 2009 vs. 2008, and for the majority of our clients, there has been little problem spending entire budgets within target ROI metrics. While this is really good news for the channel, an implication is that we are seeing a big scaling back of paid search spend these last few days right before Christmas.
Most of our retail clients’ budgets were expended earlier in the season than retailers thought and definitely earlier than we experienced the year before. In the 2008 holiday season, many more retailers were spending as much as they could butting right up to the holiday itself. This year, those retailers who still have ample budget and are therefore continuing to spend as largely as they have been all season long will enjoy lower cpcs this week as large amounts of their retail competitors drop out either altogether or scale back to only the best performing keywords and dayparts as budgets dry up.
Based on the way retail performed this holiday online, we anticipate that the week between Christmas and New Year’s will exceed 2008 by double digits.