Every year during the week of 4th of July, we hear from a handful of retail clients that demand is unusually low. The initial suspicion is that there is a problem with the online marketing campaigns adversely affecting sales. After noticing a fairly consistent pattern over time, we have learned that there’s usually not a problem with the campaigns. Rather, our experience has shown that consumer interest is unusually low this week. Vacations, travel, entertaining, the beach, and the heat are likely reasons. Apparel retail is at the tail end of the summer stock, with most merchandise on sale and Fall lines not yet in. Back to school is still a week or two away. Basically, in the past, this particular week has seen a deep loll in consumer interest in shopping.
Before tearing apart all aspects of a campaign trying to identify the problem, look first at web analytics to see if the percentages of sales from each of your marketing channels are consistent with what you typically experience. For example, if you normally see that 25% of your online sales come from paid search, 15% from natural search, 25% from direct load, 25% from email and 10% from affiliates, check to see if the percentages are the same in the week that sales are low as they are in a “normal” week. In Google Analytics, this information can be found in the Traffic Sources Overview. In Coremetrics, you can get at this data in the Marketing Channels report. In Omniture SiteCatalytst, this same information is found in the Traffic Sources Referrer Type Report.
At any time of the year, looking at this data is a great way to benchmark your sales by channel. By doing this, you are able to easily troubleshoot issues when sales dip for whatever reason. If the percentage of sales from a particular channel is much lower than normal, look first at that channel to isolate the problem. If the sales percentages for all channels are about the same as normal but sales are still low, it indicates that business is slow overall. A particularly strong email promotion can throw these percentages out of whack, but normally it is well known that the email was a strong producer, and fairly obvious then that a higher percentage in that channel will lower the percentages in all the others.
Try setting up auto-generated site analytic reporting to regularly and easily keep on top of sales trends. With extremely high temperatures in the Northeast this holiday week, hopefully consumers are inside sitting at their computers shopping. Or, they could be sitting under an umbrella on the beach with a tall cold drink… in or day or so, we’ll get a chance to see how July 4th week, 2010, has performed.
