Holiday Sales Predictions Hit The Mark

There’s a def­i­nite fes­tive buzz around the Adobe offices at present, but per­haps not the type you’d expect. I am of course refer­ring to the Adobe Dig­i­tal Index Hol­i­day pre­dic­tions we released last month.

Each year we pre­dict the online sales in the run up to Christ­mas, and this year we’ve extend­ed our report to include Europe. If you’ve not read the report, I would invite you to do so here: 2014 Hol­i­day Shop­ping Pre­dic­tion (pdf), or you can read the great break­down of the Euro­pean pre­dic­tions on CMO.com: Hol­i­day Shop­ping In Europe Gets Mobile, With UK, Ire­land Most Advanced.

For those of you short on time, here’s a quick overview from Mark Zablan’s, (Pres­i­dent, Adobe EMEA) blog arti­cle Opti­mis­ing Online Mar­ket­ing Efforts this Christ­mas Sea­son:

“Peak online shop­ping days across Europe are fore­cast to har­ness $2.1 bil­lion, with mobile shop­ping grow­ing 38 per­cent in Europe (out­pac­ing even the U.S.) and Den­mark pro­jected to see a growth in mobile online shop­ping of 56 per­cent! The UK, addi­tion­ally, will see the high­est per­cent­age of mobile shop­pers this year, with 1 in 4 Christ­mas trans­ac­tions com­ing from mobile.”

Mobile is the key theme for this year, and my col­league Jamie Brighton cap­tures it best when he said: “To put the find­ings of the Adobe Dig­i­tal Index Hol­i­day Report into two words? Mobile growth”.

The Adobe Dig­i­tal Index team puts a great deal of work into bring­ing us these pre­dic­tions, which are based on analy­sis of more than a tril­lion vis­its from 4500 web­sites over the last 7 years! How well did we do in com­par­i­son to the actu­al spend fig­ures this hol­i­day sea­son? Well the results are in, so let’s com­pare actu­al sales to our predictions.

Writ­ing this from a fes­tive Munich, I think it’s only right to start with Ger­many. We pre­dict­ed that Ger­many would have the largest online shop­ping day in Europe, with France and the UK in sec­ond and third.

France and Swe­den have both per­formed close to our pre­dic­tions. Online shop­ping Cyber Mon­day came in at €311 mil­lion in France slight­ly high­er than the sub­se­quent Sun­day. In Swe­den, Cyber Mon­day online sales were sur­passed by sales on Dec 14, which came in at €80 million.

Over to the Nether­lands, as in the UK, we saw an increase for both Black Fri­day and Cyber Mon­day with the whole week­end peri­od over per­form­ing until online sales hit their peak for this year on Dec 8.

Over­all, I’m pleased to see that on the whole the Dig­i­tal Index team has been pret­ty accu­rate with the actu­als close­ly fol­low­ing our pre­dic­tions. It is also a tes­ta­ment to the pre­dic­tive val­ue of the vast amount of anonymised data over the last 7 years. To think that in Ger­many 17% of online shop­ping is now on mobile, and 25% for the UK, real­ly makes me appre­ci­ate work­ing in such a fast mov­ing area as dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing which has seen the ecom­merce land­scape com­plete­ly shift in just a few years. I won­der what per­cent­age we’ll see next December?