Gifting Online & Offline: A Seasonal Analysis, Part 1 - Search ...

The next time you?re shopping online and moving toward checkout, pause and think about the gift wrapping option. Your gift recipient gets a nice little package, but the retailer or manufacturer gets a nice little gift as well. These folks can learn a lot about their consumers by analyzing their gifting behavior ? intelligence which can translate into huge profits when put to use.

EMarketer estimated 2010 U.S. holiday ecommerce sales at $38.5 billion, and total ecommerce revenues on an annual basis checked in at $152.1 billion. If we assume the total value of online gift purchases somewhere between those two numbers, and the reported ratio of online to offline sales holds true (between 3 and 7 percent of total), it?s clear that the total gift economy in the United States (combined online and offline) is worth at least half a trillion dollars ? and probably much more than that.

It?s not an easy number to nail down; we know from our research on the ROPO Effect about the nebulous limbo that resides between online research and offline consumer behavior. But that?s where relativity comes in.

The keywords 'gift' or 'gifts' are queried approximately 200 million times a year in the U.S. Naturally they don?t mean a whole lot by themselves, but when tied to modifiers to research products like ?gift card? or ?gift basket,? the plot thickens.?

With added focus on seasonality, we observe relative shifts in this activity, around holidays and other special occasions. And where better to dig into trended search query data than Google Insights for Search?

This tool reports search query volumes (since January 2004) as a normalized index value pegged to the highest value for a time period. In other words, on the day a particular keyword saw its highest search volume, a score of 100 would appear ? and every other date since 2004 would be measured on a 0-100 scale relative to that peak value. (Click for more on

1. Gift-related Search Activity During the Holiday Shopping Season

Let?s start with an easy one. We know that the vast majority of online shopping activity begins with a search engine. So what do we see in terms of gift-related search engine queries??

Below is a categorized view of the percent growth in Average Search Volume Index (ASVI) from October to November:

Ever notice how many ads for digital cameras you see around the holidays? Photo

• Food t just buy gifts at year?s end. With most education degrees handed out in the middle of spring, May can be a busy month for gift-related search activity.?

The Society category scores highly for one key reason: keywords like ?graduate? appear in the search engine query, skewing the results toward the Colleges such as when you realize graduation is a week away and you still need to buy a gift.

To Be Continued?

Next time, we?ll look at a few other important data sets within this gifting context:?

• Back to School shopping season
• General decline in gifting during summer months
• A few holiday gift categories which cool down considerably in December

These insights are only as good as the execution that follows ? so we?ll be sure to tell you how to put all this to use.

Footnote. The following categories of industry classification are used in this data set: Arts & Humanities, Automotive, Beauty & Personal Care, Business, Computers & Electronics, Entertainment, Finance & Insurance, Food & Drink, Games, Health, Home & Garden, Industries, Internet, Lifestyles, Local, News & Current Events, Photo & Video, Real Estate, Recreation, Reference, Science, Shopping, Social Networks & Online Communities, Society, Sports, Telecommunications, Travel.

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Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2075482/Gifting-Online-Offline-A-Seasonal-Analysis-Part-1

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