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Back-to-School: The Opportunity
Did you know that back-to-school/college brings the second largest opportunity for retailers? Back-to-school season spend is 250% higher than the third-ranking retail holiday, Valentine’s Day. 1
In 2010 the combined K-12 and college spending reached $55.12 billion. 2 Second only to Christmas, the back-to-school shopping season is a significant part of the U.S. retail industry calendar and produces a significant portion of annual sales for many major retail chains. 3 With 52% of shoppers planning to spend as much as they did last year and 13% saying they will spend even more because of the economic recovery, 4 small businesses will benefit from this year’s back–to-school shopping as well.
Optimizing your adCenter account now will help you to stay competitive during the peak season.
Trends for 2011
Consumers will continue to be budget-conscious when it comes to their back-to-school purchases. The vast majority of consumers (95 percent) are planning to use some sort of money saving technique when back-to-school shopping, and they plan to start shopping later in 2011 than they did in 2010. “We are seeing more shoppers engage with the new technologies that are changing the retail landscape by comparing prices online and watching for price drops" says Graham Jones, general manager of PriceGrabber. 4
As in 2010, mobile usage to compare prices will likely play a huge part in back-to-school shopping this year. Also, the top back-to-school money savers from last year – shopping at discount stores and printing online coupons – are expected to be heavily utilized in 2011.
Back-to-school spending also drives non-school-related purchases. In 2010 21% of consumers felt influenced to make non-school-related purchases for themselves while shopping for back-to-school items. 5
Seasonality:
It's the start of summer and the back-to-school shopping season is on the horizon, but survey data reveals that many money-savvy consumers are strategically planning to delay their shopping this year. 49 percent of back-to-school shoppers plan to make purchases in August, compared to 38 percent who said that in 2010. Only 14 percent said they will begin shopping in June, versus 26 percent in 2010. 4
This shift to a later launch of back-to-school shopping can be attributed in part to the overwhelming number of consumers indicating that they will use the Internet, which allows shoppers to compare prices and take advantage of last-minute discounts. 69 percent of consumers will shop online or use comparison shopping Websites, and 41 percent will visit retailer Websites to print out coupons. 4
2010 Trends by Segment:
Back-to-school spending in 2010 was heavily focused on clothing and accessories while the largest part of back-to-college spending went to electronics and computer-related equipment. 2
If your business falls into any of the categories shown above, please take a look at the optimization strategies below. They are designed to help small businesses staying competitive during the upcoming back-to-school season. Bookstores are not listed here but will certainly benefit from back-to-school or college spending.
Back-to-School Demographics
Judging by the gender of searchers on Bing for back-to-school categories, Moms are likely the ones doing the research online before doing the shopping in stores 6 . Locating and targeting Moms online will be crucial to the success of retailers’ back-to-school search efforts.
Women averaged more than 60% of the searches on all of these categories on Bing except for the Computers & Electronics category – the only one getting more searches from men.
The 35-49 age group accounted for the highest percentage of searches with the exception of Clothing & Apparel and Kindergarten, Preschool, and Elementary led by the 25-34 age group.
The categories most popular with young people were the Text Books and College & Dorm-related queries.
2011 Optimization opportunities:
- Expand your keyword list to include all relevant products. Don’t forget bidding on your brand name and common misspellings.
- Make sure your bids are competitive. Typically ads in positions 1 to 3 have the highest click volume and click-through rate (CTR).
- Use the free Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (MAI) tool to research average bids and get historical data for impressions and clicks. MAI can also be used to research additional keywords. To install it simply go to the Tools section within adCenter.
- Bid on all match types. This is especially important if you currently use broad match only. Phrase and exact match typically have higher CTRs and are often less expensive than broad bids.
- Test ad copy and include incentives. With the season’s peek predicted for August, July is the perfect time to try different ad copy. Small businesses often have a distinctive advantage against major retail chains when mentioning local and personal service. Increase your incentives and discounts as you are getting closer to the actual school start date.
- Be prepared to adjust your budget to manage increased traffic. adCenter’s new daily budget settings offer you the flexibility to quickly react to the market.
- Create separate content and mobile campaigns. This allows better tracking and gives you flexibility to adjust your bids. Content campaigns can be highly targeted over time by excluding URLs where your ads underperform.
- Test and refine. Analyzing your data is the key to a successful campaign. adCenter allows to send reports to your inbox, so you’ll always stay on top of things. If you don’t have a lot of time to dig into reporting, have at least a weekly keyword report sent to you and make the necessary adjustments to your bids. Optimize for keywords in low position, that have a low CTR or a low quality score. Additionally the search query performance report offers valuable insights into the actual keywords potential customers are searching for.
- Geographic and demographic targeting can be very powerful especially for small businesses. The better you know your audience, the more successful you will be. As shown above, incremental bidding for females and the age groups of 25-34 and 35-49 will likely move your ads into a better position for the selected audience.
[1] National Retail Federation/BIG Research 2010 Back to School Survey
[2] National Retailer Federation: Back-to-school and Back-to-college Trends 2010
[3] http://retailindustry.about.com/od/statisticsresearch/a/Back-To-School-Shopping-Buying-retail-Trends-2006-2007-2008-2009-2010-College-School-Age-Kids.htm
[4] PriceGrabber Back-to-school Shopping Forecast Survey, June 14 2011
[5] PriceGrabber.com Back–to-School Shopping Behavior, June 2010
[6] Microsoft Internal data based on top traffic generic B2S search terms per category
Thanks!
Peter Haubold, Vertical Specialist
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You only talk about 52% spending the same, 13% spending more, what about the rest? i.e. the 35%, are they going to be spending much less? I think so, and I could think why that crucial information was missed here...
Hi Ram,
Yes, you are correct, the remaining 35% are planning to spend less. From an advertiser perspective however the 65% spending the same or more are more interesting. Please follow the link in footnote 4 to read the details.