Shoppers Take Full Advantage Of Circular Central
Posted on 9 January 2009 by Loch RoseNo Comments
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Loading ...ShopLocal has launched Circular Central, a distributable multi-retailer shopping site that contains the online circulars for many top retailers, on Yahoo! Deals and on the IndyStar.com newspaper site. The sites are still relatively new, but it is already clear that shoppers see value in finding all of the circulars in one place, and in the flash-based presentation that invites them to browse.
Some visitors to Circular Central see the first page and leave, which is not surprising in such a new product: it wasn’t what they were expecting, so they exit immediately. But about 50% of the time, the visitor goes on to view 2 or more pages, which then constitutes a “multi-page visit”. The chart below shows just how many pages the visitors have been viewing during these multi-page visits, and how it varies by the day of the week:
No, that’s not an error: multi-page visitors viewed an average of 55 circular pages apiece on the IndyStar.com site this past Sunday. Since January 1st, 7% of visitors have viewed 100 pages or more during their visit, and that increased to 15% of visitors on Sunday January 4th.
It’s also interesting to see that the number of pages per multi-page visit on IndyStar.com peaks on Sunday then drops over the course of the week. This is consistent with our past findings on The Purchase Funnel in Online Circulars: Sunday is the day on which traffic to the circulars is highest, and is also the day on which shoppers do most of their shopping across circulars. Circular Central is of course a big time-saver for shoppers who want to view multiple circulars as they plan their shopping for the upcoming week, so seeing the highest level of page views per visit on Sunday makes perfect sense. As the week continues, shoppers have already made most of their purchase decisions and no longer need to search across circulars, so the average number of page views per visit drops.
The average page views per visit in the Yahoo site is much lower – why is that? We believe that there are two main reasons. The first is shopper expectations: visitors to IndyStar.com are often newspaper readers who are accustomed to reading the circulars delivered in their newspaper on Sunday, so now they are simply doing the same thing online. However, a lower proportion of Yahoo visitors will be accustomed to doing the same, so we don’t see the same lift on Sundays on Yahoo. The other reason is that at present Yahoo is displaying only 4 retailer circulars, compared to 22 retailers on IndyStar.com, so there are many fewer pages to browse on Yahoo:
In fact, in the current week the Yahoo site contains just 66 circular pages from 4 retailers. The selection on IndyStar.com is much larger (22 retailers with 400 circular pages):
It is clear that shoppers are finding value in the Circular Central concept, and we expect that some will become loyal and frequent users. As shoppers become accustomed to Circular Central and the percentage of return visits increases, we should see average page views/visit increase as well. Traffic will increase, encouraging more retailers to participate, which in turn will increase Circular Central’s value to shoppers and thus their loyalty and engagement.
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