Aggregated Statistics On Retail Circulars Ads & Print Promotions

Posted on 14 September 2009 by Patrick Flanagan 1 Comment

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So what does one learn by processing of all the print ads for the top 100 or so US retailers?  Quite a lot about the makeup of a circular ad.  For example, during the one year period from 9/1/2008 thru 8/31/2009 ShopLocal found that the:

ShopLocal has the unique ability to measure and trend the volume, depth and frequency of retail newspaper print advertising.

• Number of listings per promotion was on average: 137 (median = 99)
• Number of listings per promotional page was on average: 11.6 (median = 10)
• Number of overall pages per promotion was on average: 15.3 (median = 9 & mode = 9.5)
• Number of versions per promotion was on average: 17.3 (median = 3 & mode = 1)
  • By converting a decent chunk of non-versioned content (e.g., catalogs), this is why the mode is 1
• Number of promotions per year per retailer was on average: 88.5 (median = 49 & mode = 9)
  • By processing some catalogs, this is why the mode was 9 as some retailers that use catalogs only put out a few larger books per year
• Number of days that a promotion is live was on average: 30.3 (median = 9 & mode = 7)
  • For most typical Sunday newspaper type circulars, the typical sale spans 7 days – Sunday thru Saturday
• English language promotions make up about 93%, Spanish contributes 6% and French contributes 2%
• Circular type promotions make up 84% of the overall ad volume and the rest is split between catalogs (7%), guides (1%) mailers (1%), ROP ads (1%) and other (6%)

I’m looking forward on doing some more analysis with the awesome heavy lifting that our in-house analytics team provides to help trend these stats against historical data going back to 1999 so as to gauge the level of print promotion decline that seems to be discussed frequently in the media lately.  My hypothesis is that the decline will be very minimal at best and limited to certain retail industry segments.