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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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JCPenney’s American Living Launch

March 05, 2008

During last week’s broadcast of the Oscar awards, JCPenney launched the new American Living line (through a partnership with Polo Ralph Lauren Corp.) of apparel & home products. American Living is the biggest merchandise launch in JCPenney’s history, so I thought I would have a look at the initial online results.

There was an immediate bump in traffic to the American Living website on the day following the airing of the commercials promoting the new brand. In addition to the media coverage around the launch, traffic from an email campaign also helped drive interest in the microsite. Forty percent of the upstream traffic to AmericanLiving.com was from Yahoo! Mail and 28 percent was from Windows Live Mail on Monday, Feb. 25th.

JCPenney.com experienced lifts in traffic in the days following the Oscars, but only the brand was promoted during the awards show, with no direct mention of the URL. These traffic lifts could in part be from the availability of the new American Living products; however the retailer regularly runs online sales that could also have an impact.

The American Living website is one page deep and acts essentially as an online placeholder for the brand. Following the initial airing of the commercials, the site was successfully driving traffic to JCPenney.com as visitors clicked through to see more information about the products. On Monday, Feb. 25th, American Living was the top referral source and responsible for 13.45% of the upstream traffic to JCPenney's website.

An interesting point to note about the traffic is that 41% of the visitors were new, or had not visited JCPenney.com in the past 30 days. The share of new and returning visitors can help JCPenney evaluate if the new brand is both appealing to the current customer base and attracting incremental new customers. The numbers were similar for the entire week (ending March 1, 2008), with the upstream traffic to JCPenney.com from American Living split with 42% new and 58% returning visitors.

Although the American Living website has not been around long, there is a significant difference in the audiences of the two websites. For American Living, the initial audience is skewing older than the typical JCPenney.com visitor – 55 percent of the traffic is aged 55 and over as compared to 25 percent for JCPenney.com during the same time period (4 weeks ending March 1, 2008). The differences may be attributable to JCPenney customers by-passing the American Living website altogether, seeking information directly on JCPenney.com.

Tweet Posted by Heather Dougherty at 04:38 PM | (3) | (0)
In Categories Shopping and Classifieds

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