Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Economics & Thanksgiving Flower sales

As some of you know, I am active (today I’m wearing my designer hat) in two brick & mortar flower shops that my family owns. Over the years we have seen a decline in Thanksgiving sales and this year is, as you can imagine, no exception. After all, it’s just after 12-noon and I’ve found the time to write this. 

In the old days, there was a lot of planning related to staffing, flower ordering, and the positioning of our delivery vans. This year however we are staffed as we would be for any other typical Wednesday; and the only planning related to flower ordering was to get an amount of flowers that we thought we could sell based on the declining pattern of the last two months. 

In looking at our stats and comparing it with last year’s stats, we see that we are almost dead even with last year. That sounds good right? Well, yes it does. But the down side here is that we are only keeping pace with last years stats because of our number #1 placement for the search phrase “thanksgiving flowers.” 

I’ve always felt that our in-house sales should lead the way but this year we are more reliant than ever on our online sales. For us, in this declining economical environment, SEO is very important because with out it I’m not sure how things would be. 

Any way, I thought I would present my website conversion stats compared to the number of searchers that landed on Thanksgivingflowers.net for the period of November 10th to noon today November 25th 2008. I’ll let each of you judge the stats on your own as I’m sure our pro-Proflowers commentator will have something to say…..

Here it is: we had 52 conversions from our $10 website related to following top 25 search queries:
[Keep in mind that these 52 orders are orders that we would have never had we not had a strong online presence]

Visits

2,949

% of Site Total: 95.56%

Pages/Visit

1.29

Site Avg: 1.30 (-0.86%)

Avg. Time on Site

00:00:31

Site Avg: 00:00:33 (-7.20%)

% New Visits

94.98%

Site Avg: 94.72% (0.28%)

Bounce Rate

80.94%

Site Avg: 80.27% (0.84%)

Dimension:
Keyword
VisitsPages/VisitAvg. Time on Site% New VisitsBounce Rate
1.1,4441.3100:00:3292.38%80.47%
2.3091.3700:00:3697.09%74.43%
3.2801.0700:00:0699.64%93.93%
4.1171.2200:00:3097.44%83.76%
5.861.3100:00:3595.35%79.07%
6.611.3600:00:4096.72%78.69%
7.501.2000:00:4892.00%86.00%
8.441.3600:00:1797.73%75.00%
9.301.2300:00:09100.00%86.67%
10.221.2300:01:2795.45%81.82%
11.191.1100:00:26100.00%94.74%
12.161.1200:00:04100.00%87.50%
13.131.1500:00:12100.00%84.62%
14.121.0800:00:1091.67%91.67%
15.121.2500:00:14100.00%75.00%
16.111.0900:00:01100.00%90.91%
17.91.1100:00:1088.89%88.89%
18.71.8600:00:2185.71%71.43%
19.61.6700:00:37100.00%66.67%
20.61.1700:00:37100.00%83.33%
21.51.0000:00:00100.00%100.00%
22.51.2000:00:09100.00%80.00%
23.51.2000:00:47100.00%80.00%
24.41.2500:00:20100.00%75.00%
25.41.5000:00:13100.00%75.00%