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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Sales searches drive department store traffic

April 02, 2009

The spring sales have started on the high street, and department stores are the main beneficiaries online. While UK Internet visits to our Shopping and Classifieds parent category increased by just 0.9% last week, a custom category of ‘traditional’ high street department store websites (e.g. John Lewis, Debenhams, Littlewoods, etc.) experienced a 21.0% increase. As the chart below illustrates, last week a number of the larger high street names experienced their first big increases in traffic since Christmas.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_high_street_retailers_argos_m&s_tesco_direct_debenhams_littlewoods_john_lewis_next_2009_chart.png

Argos remains the most popular high street retailer online, but Debenhams saw the largest increase in visits (45.3%) last week. Other noticeable gainers included: Next (40.2%), Marks & Spencer (30.7%), and Littlewoods (18.7%). In case there was any doubt that these traffic increase were driven the sales, the chart below illustrates the increase in searches for a number of key branded sale terms.

UK_retail_sales_searches_2009_next_debenhams_marks_and_spencer_bhs_sale_chart.png

Last week ‘next sale’ was the most popular of all the 96,000 terms containing the word ‘sale’ that were searched for in the UK. Between the weeks ending 21/03/09 and 28/03/09, UK Internet searches for ‘next sale’ increased 12-fold, while the terms ‘marks and spencer sale’ (5x) and ‘debenhams sale’ (4x) also experienced significant increases. Searches for the basic term ‘sales’ also doubled, with Littlewoods (19.2%) and Debenhams (11.4%) picking up the most traffic. Interestingly though, while Littlewoods paid for most its traffic from the term, Debenhams relied exclusively on organic traffic.

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