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I’ve been tracking the YoY results of a collection of 20 large retail accounts over the past year. These are companies who spend more than $50K per month, have been with us for more than 2 years, and haven’t radically changed their marketing efficiency goals during that time.

Looking at this small base, we can’t claim that the median performance is representative of all retail as that certainly isn’t the case. However, we’ve kept looking at this same small group of clients to at least give us a sense of performance trends, if not absolute performance numbers.

In May, we saw our first Year over Year improvement for the median client in the basket. Huge standard deviation, naturally, but coming from a first quarter in the neighborhood of -20% in PPC sales and costs, this was a pretty big deal…we hoped.

At the end of that piece I expressed a fear that this may be a Mother’s Day effect. Maybe folks spent more on mom than last year because they didn’t go to visit?

June numbers indicate that that fear might have been on target.

For this basket of clients, we saw median sales drop of 8% year-over-year. Nothing like the Q1 numbers, but not the 3% growth we saw in May, either. Again, the standard deviation here is a whopping plus or minus 32%, so the results are really all over the map.

Most of the dip is related to traffic volumes (-11%) rather than AOV or conversion rate which are both actually up slightly.

What do these numbers mean?

Don’t know for sure, but I’d suggest that it reflects a recovery underway but moving slowly.

May it gain momentum, soon!

Love to hear what others have seen.

George

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  • Kathleen Raines: In my letter I did put the wrong month. I said April it should have been May.
  • Kathleen Raines: CEO Mike Ullman III, On January 26, 2010 I order a sofa, love seat and chair. I was told it would take 6-8 weeks since it was a...
  • Lance: George - Thanks so much for the interview and the kind words. Jake - We have seen the gains from our tests hold up. But I am sensitive to...
  • Andrew@BloggingGuide: I liked what he said: our approach is to never be satisfied, and always seek incremental improvement. This is absolutely true...
  • Jake Minturn: Great interview! One thing I am curious about, and I’d love to get Lance’s take on this, is if these boosts in conversion...
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  • George Michie: Thanks for the kind words Lance and Bryan. Andy, I feel your pain. I meant to include a section on why site exclusions didn’t...
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