Oneupweb Releases 2007 Valentine's Day Study

February 20, 2007; 01:44 AM

Online marketing firm Oneupweb today released its study, Searching for Love: Valentine's Day Online Retail Buying Trends, revealing that online Valentine's Day buying peaked on February 6th, while shopping continued through the 12th, and the bulk of activity occurred on Mondays and Tuesdays, probably while consumers were at work. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of natural search optimization to well-balanced e-commerce marketing plans, discovering that natural (or free) search engine results provide 34 percent more traffic and 21 percent more sales than paid search (or pay-per-click) campaigns. The study, which is available free at Oneupweb.com, tracked nearly 300,000 consumers from February 1st through the 13th across a wide variety of internet retailers selling Valentine's Day related products and services.

"Valentine's Day is such a short sales season--different from Christmas where purchases may be made months in advance--that I expected paid search to play the larger role," says Oneupweb President and Founder, Lisa Wehr. "For many of our clients, Valentine's is second in revenue to Christmas and bigger than Mother's Day. Clearly the data shows that e-commerce companies that don't optimize will miss out on a huge part of the market."

In order to help e-commerce marketers, especially those in the gift industry, leverage the data, Oneupweb also provides best practices in the study. The advice helps internet retailers to capitalize on the following online buying trends:

Tuesday Feb. 6th was peak Valentine's sales day online. The second highest online sales day is Monday, February 5th. The sales data supports the trend that consumers are shopping from work. Motivating factors include:
• Broadband at work makes it easier to shop there than dial-up at home
• Consumers don't find what they want in traditional bricks-and-mortar stores over the weekend
• Consumers want to research and shop without significant others looking over their shoulders

Online traffic peak for Valentine's Day was Monday, Feb. 12th. Consumers are shopping online as late as Monday, February 12th, although conversion rates and sales don't keep pace. Oneupweb suggests several implications from this information. First, consumers may have procrastinated, hoping to purchase online gifts only to discover that items can't be shipped in time. Or, last minute shoppers are getting ideas and comparison shopping before heading to traditional stores.

Free Love from search engines is still the best. Natural (or free) search results provided 34 percent more traffic and 21 percent higher sales than pay-per-click ads or sponsored results.

Weekends aren't big online shopping days for Cupid. Weekend dips in traffic, conversion rates and sales may be explained by several possibilities:
• Broadband at the office is easier to use than dial-up at home
• Consumers wanted to keep their online purchases secret from spouses and sweethearts
• Consumers may have been shopping at traditional brick-and-mortar stores
• Busy lives may have prevented online shopping on weekends

Cupid plays no favorites; search engine trends similar. Oneupweb tracked activity on each search engine separately and found that traffic and sales ebb and flow at similar levels. As expected, Google is still Goliath, delivering 75 percent of the traffic, 72 percent of sales. Yahoo and MSN follow: Yahoo provided 16 percent of traffic, 18 percent of sales. MSN trailed with 9 percent of traffic and 10 percent of sales.

About Oneupweb

Oneupweb (http://www.oneupweb.com/) has been an innovator in online marketing for more than a decade, creating integrated online marketing plans that include natural search engine optimization, paid search marketing, podcast production, online market research, marketing analytics and more. An award-winning firm, Oneupweb was named a 2006 Michigan Top 50 Company to Watch and is the only three-time winner of the prestigious ClickZ Best Search Engine Marketing Vendor Award. President and founder, Lisa Wehr, an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, has been named to BtoB Magazine's Who's Who List three years and is recognized as a Leader & Innovator by Lawrence Technological University. The company publishes an SEO / SEM newsletter OnlineMarketingBrief.com and a blog named StraightUpSearch.com. Oneupweb is a privately held company located in Michigan.