Posted on 25 November 2009 by Loch Rose
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November has shown an unusual level of deals compared to the usual relative quiet during the run-up to Black Friday. In fact, retailers have extended an average of 16% more offers during November 1-23:
Consumers are responding, with 23% more visits to the online circulars hosted by ShopLocal:
Page views on the online circular have increased even more, running a remarkable 44% above 2008:
Clearly the retailers are extending the holiday shopping season, and consumers are responding. Historically, visits to the online circular have been a strong predictor of in-store sales, and if that holds true, retailers should see strong sales in the pre-Thanksgiving period.
However, the implications for sales on Black Friday are less clear. Certainly consumers are engaged, which is a good sign for sales on Black Friday and for November as a whole, but they may have taken advantage of the early offers to complete much of their holiday shopping already. The most likely outcome is solid but not exceptional store traffic and sales on Black Friday itself, while retail sales for the month as a whole are stronger than predicted.
All things deals, sales and coupons are red hot and the smart folks over at Gannett Digital has been listening to this ever growing consumer demand. So a combined team from ShopLocal, Planet Discover and Gannett Digital has been working together over the last few months to create a streamlined and consolidated “deals” experience for nearly all of the local newspaper.com sites that Gannett operates.
The result of this effort is visible at deals.desmoinesregister.com which does a great job of bringing together many different types of deals all under one unified site. From a user’s point for view, this is absolutely the right move, as it consolidates local deal content that was previously fragmented all across the newspaper.com site and wraps it up in a searchable and browseable manner.
The types of content that are available in these deals sites to shoppers include:
The Des Moines Register just launched the first of many new local deals sites. This is the main entry page of the deal site. All of the dynamic, localized data that appears in the "Sunday deals all week long" section comes from ShopLocal's SmartDelivery API including the three most popular circular front cover images for that market.
From the 'Weekly Deals' link in the top menu bar, a user is taken into the familiar CircularCentral flash based user interface that allows a shopper to browse all of the newspaper ads online in one easy to use location.
Chalk another successful new partner product launch up! Its great to see the trade publications pick up the story that is contained within Kaboodle’s recent integration of the Target Weekly Ad within their social shopping community. The combination of social and local really is the future of retail advertising. This is a great early example of how this may look with forward looking feature like sharing, commenting and shopping list making.
The Target Weekly Ad just keeps popping up everywhere! This advertiser
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.
The ShopLocal Retail Index was up 31 percent for the month of July compared to the same period last year. The Index registered at 255, the second highest-ever level ever for a non-holiday period (benchmarked at 100 for January 2006).
This trend should continue, as shown by a recent NRF survey republished by eMarketer. Heading into the back-to-school shopping season, 42% of consumers plan to make more use of circulars and 26% plan to make more use of the Internet to help them in planning their shopping. Overwhelmingly, they plan to be shopping in-store: only 22% plan to make any back-to-school purchases online, down from 25% in 2008.
July 2009 ShopLocal Index highlights include:
- The ShopLocal Index is up 31 percent in July year-over-year, with 322 million page views (adjusted), versus 267 million last year.
- The Consumer Electronics, Computers and Office Supplies segment led the way with 49 percent more page views than last year, followed by the Department Stores and Mass Merchant segment with 27 percent growth.
- The Home & Garden segment showed the weakest growth, up just 2 percent from a year ago.
- Consumer page views per visit on a per retailer basis averaged 11.4 for the month of July, up 3% from a year ago.
The ShopLocal Index is the advertising industry’s first market indicator designed to track the influence of the Internet on in-store shopping. Updated monthly, the Index is based on the online activity of more than 25 million monthly consumer visits to in-store local promotions that are presented on the sites of more than 50 major U.S. retailers, including JCPenney, Target, Best Buy, Walgreens and Home Depot. These retailers cover all major retail segments including computers, consumer electronics, office supplies, home improvement, department stores, mass merchants, grocery, drug and various specialty stores. The retailers’ online circular sites are powered by ShopLocal’s SmartCircular technology.
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