For anyone working in SEO/PPC industry, today is quite a significant day. History is set to be made as we are set to see unprecedented amounts of money spent by consumers online here in the UK. Today has been dubbed ‘Mega Monday’. Cyber Monday has historically always fallen on the 1st Monday of the month and with last Friday being the last payday before Christmas and a weekend spent browsing and deciding on gifts to buy our loved ones, this years Cyber Monday falls today, December 3rd [1].
Experts predict consumers will spend an estimated whopping £222,000 a minute today which is an overall increase of 21% on last year.
This is big news for our clients who are hopefully set to see online profits increase over the next few weeks with predictions of £4.6bn being spent by consumers [2].
America’s Cyber Monday – which was last week – saw an increase in 27% from 2011[3] which is a positive indicator for the UK online retail industry. Online retailing giants are cashing in on the opportunity with many savvy retailers offering huge savings to their customers, resulting in huge success. Although there are bargains and savings to be made there are also scams and fraudsters to be aware of. Visa Europe are warning customers to be weary and have given some top tips when buying online, such as; making sure your card number is encrypted securely, keeping a record of your online spending and making sure you take note of the websites contact details [4].
With 4,722 estimated transactions being made every minute, what’s interesting is the role that mobile technology is now playing on our online spending behaviour. As more and more people own smartphones and tablets, business advisory firm Deloitte have projected that £3.5bn of the Christmas online spend will have been influenced or purchased via a smartphone [5]. This is something that will be of interest to many retailers who are still unsure about the success of mobile retail.
Top Tips for Mega Monday
With all this predicted online retail activity, what does this mean for our customers? and how should they adapt and be ready for this proposed increased expenditure in the run up to Christmas? I put the question to our Head of PPC, Pete Whitmarsh who had this advice to give to retailers running PPC campaigns:
- Make sure your budget caps are large enough to allow for the inevitable increased search traffic
- Ad text should contain messages like Order Now for Guaranteed Christmas Delivery (this is a good general tip in the approach for Christmas anyway – not specifically Mega Monday).
- Increase bids slightly as traffic should be of a higher quality on this day (if conversion rate is higher, then the value of a click is higher – therefore we should bid more).
- Do landing page testing in advance of Mega Monday to ensure that you can deliver top quality landing pages for the day.
Here is a roundup of the best #cybermonday tweets:
Happy Mega Monday everyone!
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