We’ve reported on US paid search findings and social advertising performance during the 2015 holiday season, and now, we’re calling out some UK-specific insights for the Christmas season.
Some of our early analysis revealed how Black Friday is now taking a hold in the U.K. Year-on-year (YoY) search spend was up nearly 14% and sales increased nearly 25% for the day.
If we look at the entire Christmas season (1 November through 25 December), it wasn’t just Black Friday that experienced a boost. Overall, spend and revenue were up for full period, as were impressions and clicks.
If we compare some of this performance to the US, we can see that the UK saw similar overall growth as the US for spend and impressions, but yielded more growth in clicks and advertiser sales revenue, resulting in a greater increase in ROI for the season.
These insights confirm that paid search continues to be a worthwhile investment for UK retailers. In addition to search, UK marketers should explore new retail-friendly ad types and publishers — think Instagram and Facebook — to complement existing efforts, while keeping a close eye on the bigger picture of the entire digital ecosystem.
Stay tuned as we expand beyond the Christmas season and evaluate digital marketing throughout Q4 on a global scale. In the meantime, you can download a more complete analysis of holiday trends here.