The Christmas period is always a step change in the use of the internet for shopping. We've seen this since the mid nineties and clearly the panic of Christmas shopping, combined with changes in leisure time, create a new opportunity for internet behaviour to evolve quickly.
Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst from Nielsen NetRatings explained what happened this Christmas. His research explores where advertisers fit in the ecosystem of internet marketing and the development of internet commerce.
- Around 2000 pages per month are consumed by the average European internet users, with 'heavy' users clocking up more than three times this.
- We're seeing people spend 10% more in terms of sessions, 18% in terms of time and a massive 27% in terms of pages.
- More then two third of European online visited ecommerce sites at Christmas with more than half the online population visiting the large online shopping services like Amazon and EBay.
- It may not be a surprise that Ecommerce is growing rapidly, but with the total internet audience only growing 9% each year in Europe, there's a much steeper growth in the reach and intensity of the use of internet commerce sites. Shopping directories and guides are proving particularly fast in their growth, although the experience across the different countries varies greatly.
NetRatings can also reveal how display advertising has grown in the number of advertisers and the number of campaigns running across Europe. There are 8% more companies running (which in turn leads to 20% more adverts).
For me the most fundamental point is that the research also reveals deeper lessons from online shoppers and their behaviour which helps explain why firms should advertise online. In the UK 70% of internet users now claim that "the internet is the best source of product information". 44% of people see the internet as being the place they "do their shopping research before buying online", a statistic that helps answer the question about how internet advertising drives offline sales. We're also seeing the more sophisticated third of online shoppers claim that they will spend as much time as possible doing their shopping on the web rather than the highstreet. And the average spend? €352 per person during December.
As for why people are shopping online? Convenience and the lack of crowds are now being seen as the leading reasons compared to the discounting and price comparisons of a few years before.
Ask your national IAB team about research they may have for online audiences and spending patterns, and sign up for the IAB Europe Informer research service by emailing your details to iabeurope@iabeurope.ws
