Salmat Pre-Shop® News | January 2009
| Welcome to the first issue of Salmat Digital Pre-Shop® News for 2009.
We're devoting this entire issue to taking a look at how Lasoo performed over the busy Christmas season. We’re doing this not because we love beating our own drum (although it can’t hurt!) but because the results offer an interesting insight into how both consumers and retailers are responding to the new landscape. That landscape being the era of Pre-Shop, with consumers searching for offers online before heading in-store. The trend is set to continue throughout 2009.
I hope you had a happy and relaxing break over Christmas and are ready for the year ahead.
Kind regards
Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital
Lasoo.com.au Christmas round-up
Christmas 2008 started quite early this year with the ramp up for shoppers beginning from September 20 for offline retailers and peaking on December 27. The e-tailer shopping season was a little shorter, beginning around October 11 and ending a bit before Christmas at about December 15.
The big difference between this year and last year was that in 2008, retailers embraced Pre-Shopping, and extended the gap between retailers and e-tailers. The graph below shows the same custom categories for Christmas in 2007, illustrating a much closer race, with a significantly smaller market share of all web traffic.
Coming into December, Christmas 2008 was something of an unknown quantity for Lasoo.com.au. Although the site was in existence last December, it was only a month old and still in its infancy. In 2008, however, Lasoo was running at full capacity, boasting catalogues from over 60 of Australia’s leading retailers, including Target, BIG W, Myer, Kmart, Rebel Sport, BWS, Coles... and many, many more.
Backed by a large nationwide advertising and marketing campaign from November onwards (I am guessing you may have seen our bus, tram and outdoor advertising, as well as coffee cups, radio spots and press coverage), December proved to be an outstanding month, as more than 1.1 million Australians visited the site throughout the month (as compared to 323,000 in December last year) to search for gifts, groceries, electronics and other supplies for the holiday season. They recorded almost 39 million page views on Lasoo, which is around eight times the amount from December last year, and way up on November 2008’s figure of just over 25 million page views. It’s amazing how much things can change in just 12 months.
Independent research conducted by Nielsen earlier this year found that 25% of visitors to Lasoo go on to complete a purchase in-store after viewing it online. That means that 277,000 Australian consumers made a purchase during December after seeing an offer listed on Lasoo. That’s a lot of people buying from seeing an ad on Lasoo in just one month.
If you didn't believe in the era of the multi-channel consumer before – meaning those shoppers who integrate both online and offline channels into their purchasing process – then hopefully our results over the Christmas period have helped to demonstrate the ever increasing importance of online advertising for offline retail stores.
The other leading indicator from Christmas 2008 is that the majority of searches remained at a product level. There is a whole lot of people searching for you and your site. But there are even more who are searching for products and brands. Don’t forget that when you set your marketing objectives for online in 2009. More on this in the next issue.
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| Sound bites…
Online ad spending will rise 8.9% in 2009.
- eMarketer
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