Insights on search behavior around gifting from analyzing the back to school period, why gifting slows down in July-August, and examining last-minute gadgets and computers around the December holidays.
Last time, we began our look at behavioral search query insights around gift giving from a search marketing perspective by looking at trends in the use of “gift” as a search keyword in Google – and learned a few things in the process:
As we look beyond the spike in shopping around the holiday season, a number of interesting gifting occasions show their own unique patterns.
Reminder: the key metric in this analysis is called Average Search Volume Index, or ASVI. For more insight into our research methodology, see here.
With a New School Year Approaching, People Can’t Resist Giving More “Studious” Gifts
While we may not traditionally think of the back to school period as a big gifting occasion, whatever gift giving is going on indeed skews toward items of some educational relevance (the Arts & Humanities category). This is where book retailers really shine; are we perhaps seeing adult gift-givers trying to get school-aged gift recipients a little more excited about returning to the classroom?
The back to school season also doesn’t seem to diminish searchers’ interest in recreation: outdoor activities like boating, cycling, running, hiking, and camping, as well as crafts and hobbies. Note that this category doesn’t include sports like baseball, basketball, football, or soccer, which get their own separate category in Google Insights.
Several Key Categories Characterize a Slow Gifting Season in July & August
July and August can be relatively quiet from a gifting perspective. Summer birthdays notwithstanding, this slow period sits right between an active spring (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduations) and the busy fall, which is characterized by an elongated shopping run-up to the holiday season.
What are the biggest drivers of this decline? For starters, it looks like the Recreation category, highly active during the spring and fall, enjoys a bit of quiet in July and August. We know that outdoor activities are popular in the summer, but according to the data, the relative demand for those gifts in fact bottoms out in the summer.
A few other categories are not far behind:
Gadgets & Computers are Popular Last-Minute Gift Purchases During the Holidays
Computers & Electronics is a little misleading here. Because we’re using a tricky metric based on averages of a normalized index, we’re exposed to a big weakness in the data.
If there happens to be an abnormally high figure for a certain data period, it pushes down the index value for all the other values, which dilutes the average. And that’s exactly what happens with this category, the week before Christmas. This could be an indication that digital cameras, computers & laptops, home video & audio, and personal electronics like iPods (but not iPhones) are very popular last-minute purchases for the stressed-out gift giver.
The same holds true for categories like Games (especially video games). As for the others, that’s anyone’s guess, including the outliers at the top of the chart.
To Be Continued…
Our analysis continues next time when we’ll drill down into the Shopping category, where a lot of important products and services reside: apparel/clothing, flowers, luxury goods, and collectibles. We’ll also get to see more about gifters’ demand for information like product reviews, coupons, price comparisons, and general customer service.
After that, we’ll wrap everything up and provide some best practices for how you can put this data to good use – as well as dig up an insight or two of your own.
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.