Consumers Search for Valentine s Day Gifts and Activities

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1 Gifts.com Tops the Online Search Results for Valentine's Day 2012

2 Executive Summary In the modern internet age, Valentine s Day has become a day that consumers naturally turn to the web for gifts and activities for that special someone. According to a recent Consumer Insights study from Google, Valentine s Day searches have increased 35% year over year, with an expected $210B on the line for webinfluenced sales in In late January 2012, Conductor analyzed over 1,700 high-volume geographically and non-geographic specific keywords in our SEO platform, Searchlight, to determine domains that appeared most frequently for Valentine s Day queries. Our analysis showed gifts.com was the overall winner, appearing in the top five search results for 6 out of 10 non-geographic Gifts keywords. The SERPs for local search, geo queries were less competitive of the ten domains with the most appearances, eight appeared in the top five less than 10% of the time--but yelp.com and gayot.com appeared consistently at the top of the results. Consumers Search for Valentine s Day Gifts and Activities In performing keyword discovery of high-volume Valentine s Day queries in advance of the research, a taxonomy of the kinds of queries consumers make for Valentine s Day became apparent.

3 Keywords were segmented into two categories: Gifts Activities To understand how the search results differ for geographic vs. non-geographic queries we further segmented both sets of keywords into geographic vs. nongeographic queries. This left us with four keyword segments: A recent Think Insights Google report on Valentine Searches confirms our keyword segmentation, reporting the top 3 sources of Valentine revenue go to jewelry, dining out, and flowers, respectively. Our keyword research and segmentation corroborates this report, and expands on the differences between the local (geo) and non-geo results. In the end, we analyzed more than 1,700 keywords representing more than 12.8 million monthly searches. Gifts.com and Redenvelope.com Winners in SERPs for Non-Geo Gifts Keywords Looking first at non-geographic gifts terms, gifts.com had the best performance of any domain across all categories we studied, appearing in a top 5 position for 6 out of 10 keywords analyzed (). Analysis of their site shows Valentine s Day is right in their sweet spot, with ten categories of Valentine s Day gifts to choose from as well as 39 whole pages of gifts in the Valentine s Day Gifts for Women category.

4 gifts.com Gift site redenvelope.com had the second most frequent SERP appearances at 37%. Analysis of their site shows a particular focus on Valentine s Day (even in late January, more than two weeks before the actual day) with a large ribbon on the home page devoted to Valentine s Day gifts and numerous Valentine s Day gifts keywords peppered throughout the page content.

5 redenvelope.com Considering the geographic searches we analyzed in our study are essentially nongeographic searches with the top 10 metro areas (determined by population) appended to them (e.g. find a valentine date and find a valentine date NYC ). We were able to compare non-geographic to geographic SERPS. Our goal in comparing non-geographic results to geographic to determine how the search marketplace differs for geo vs. non-geo queries in this vertical necessarily. We found that a domain s visibility for non-geo queries was not a strong indicator of success for geo queries. Additionally, the top geo performers appeared at a scale far less than non-geo; only two domains appeared in the top 5 more than 10% of the time. Put another way, the market for Valentine s Day geo gift queries is far more open to smaller regional players than non-geo searches.

6 Geographic SERPs Very Different from Non-Geographic Looking next at Valentines Day activities keywords, about.com and opentable.com appear in top 5 search positions for one-quarter of non-geo (no location specified) keywords. The remainder of the landscape is more wide-open, with 8 of the top 10 domains reaching no more than 12% of keywords in top 5 search positions. When it came to geo activities queries, we once again saw Yelp at the top of the heap, this time appearing in the top 5 for 34% of queries (compared to 15% for geo gifts queries). Restaurant, hotel, and travel review site gayot.com was close behind, appearing 33% of the time (unlike Yelp, they also had a strong showing for non-geo activity queries, appearing 12% of the time).

7 Yelp More Visible in SERPs, Zagat Featured in Expanded Local Results With the recent attention around Google s new Search Plus Your World and the accompanying increase of Google + in the search results, it is interesting to note that Google-owned restaurant review site zagat.com appeared in the top five 15% of the time compared to rival Yelp s 34%. We did, however, note that for many queries that included map pack results where results expand into the right panel, Zagat is featured prominently in the Menu item and in the More reviews sections while rival Yelp has been pushed to fend for itself in the SERPs. Opportunity for Regional Businesses in Local SERPs When we break out geographic queries results by metro area, we see yelp.com and gayot.com in the top five for most high-visibility appearances for eight and nine of the ten cities we looked at. Nonetheless, the remaining three of the top five most appearances in each city were primarily occupied by regional business such as breensflorist.com in the Houston area and visitphilly.com in Philadelphia.

8 Download the full infographic at: Conductor.com/valentineinfographic Conclusion: Opportunity for Retailers in Regional SERPs Our analysis of the Valentine s Day landscape was instructive in revealing that unlike other verticals we have analyzed such as consumer electronics, toys, clothing, beauty and jewelry in our recent holiday study, there were not several retailers that consistently dominated the SERPs. Excluding gifts.com, no domain appeared in the top five search positions more than 37% of the time, even less when considering only geographic searches. Given the relative open field in the geographic Valentine s Day landscape, retailers would be well-served to understand the individual regional markets in which they operate and perform careful keyword research to capture their share of search in their regional marketplaces.

9 Valentine s Day 2012 in Online Search Google s thinkinsights states Valentine s Day online searches have increased 35% year over year with Americans expected to spend over $15 Billion on 2012 Valentine s Day purchases. Conductor tracked over 1,700 Valentine s Day keywords in our SEO platform, Searchlight, and segmented keywords into Valentine Gifts and Activities queries. Keywords were further segmented as Geographic or Non-Geographic to determine how search engine results differ for both query types. Results shown represent percentage of keywords analyzed in which the domain appears in the top five search positions Activities Gifts Geographic 11% 10% 40% datehookup.com mingle2.com 20% gifts.com 23% 40% 34% gayot.com 33% opentable.com 17% 20% opentable.com about.com redenvelope.com 37% Big winners include gifts.com and redenvelope.com for Gifts searches, and yelp.com and gayot.com for Activities yelp.com delish.com findgift.com 40% 23% 14% 12% 20% 20% 40% Non-Geographic Non-Geographic yelp.com Geographic 15% Geographic Results by City Chicago San Jose New York City 53% yelp.com 37% rosiesandposies.com 33% cittisflorist.com 39% chicagomarcelflorist.com 36% kandkflower.com 30% cityenchantedgardens.com 40% starflor.com 31% aristonflorist.com 19% about.com 62% yelp.com 38% uptake.com 38% gayot.com 44% gayot.com 33% yelp.com 23% chicagomag.com 48% nymag.com 30% nyc.com 30% zagat.com Los Angeles Phoenix Dallas Philadelphia 33% yelp.com 21% theflowerfactory.com 18% about.com 34% phoenixflowershops.com 31% cactusflower.com 25% about.com 30% mockingbirdflorist.com 27% drdelphinium.com 23% alloccasiondallas.com 26% 26% 22% kremp.com visitphilly.com speeddatephiladelphia.com 65% yelp.com 55% losangelesrestaurants.com 51% gayot.com 54% about.com 46% azcentral.com 46% gayot.com 36% opentable.com 29% iliveindallas.com 21% about.com 46% 38% 31% pavisnet.com yelp.com citysearch.com San Diego Houston San Antonio 36% missionhillsflorist.com 33% allensflowers.com 33% deluxeflorist.com 39% springgardenflowershop.com 37% oakhillsflorist.com 26% bloomingcreationsflorist.com 38% aceflowershouston.com 34% breensflorist.com 25% lokigardens.com 47% gayot.com 40% opentable.com 27% yelp.com 38% gayot.com 31% about.com 31% urbanspoon.com 36% opentable.com 36% gayot.com 29% about.com yelp.com dominated Valentine s Day in San Jose, California with the majority of both Gifts and Activity searches View the full report at Valentine s Day Gifts Valentine s Day Activities Google-owned zagat.com appeared in top 5 for Activities searches 15% of the time compared to the 34% of the time for yelp.com Methodology: Keyword discovery was performed in Google s Adwords Tool in late January ,709 keywords were then segmented into one of two categories: Activities and Gifts. The top ten US cities by population were then appended to keywords where appropriate (e.g. valentines day and valentines day NYC ) resulting in four keyword segments. Top ten cities include: NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas & San Jose. Keywords were tracked in Searchlight in January and calculations were made to determine the domains appearing most often in the top five positions. About Conductor, Inc. Conductor is the undisputed leader in SEO technology, empowering enterprise marketers to manage and improve their SEO efforts and deliver provable ROI. The company created the first and most widely adopted enterprise SaaS SEO technology solution, Conductor Searchlight, which helps marketers scale natural search, monitor competitive market share and boost revenue. Conductor recently launched the SEO Cloud, which makes it possible to blend SEO data and work$ow across any other form of web marketing. Companies such as FedEx, Siemens, Toys R Us, Autodesk and GE rely on the company's technology platform and team of experts to continually measure and improve their natural search traffic and revenue.copyright 2011 Conductor, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Various trademarks held by their respective owners. version 1.0