Get Ready For The Back To School Rush To Buy

By Jane Dawson

Do you sell children''s clothing, backpacks, lunch boxes, calculators, office supplies, teachers aids or any of the dozens of other products that constitute the back-to-school buying frenzy? If so, you should be stocking up now for the August rush.

As mothers and children sleep in a little longer in the morning and stock up on bubble solution and floaties for the pool, online retailer should be several beats ahead, as always.

Search queries, including phrases such as back to school, start to grow in July, peak in mid-August and begin to recede by mid-September, just in time to get ready for holiday buying.

Hitwise, one of the Internet''s leading data intelligence collectors, has traced the back to school phenomenon over the past several years. Their data shows that the search volume increases by a factor of almost twenty during this period, jumping from .001% of all search terms to .04% of all search terms.

Their historical data also showed that while 2005 and 2006 were very good years with spikes to .038% and .058%, last years searches were severely affected by the combination of high gas prices and the downturn in the economy with searches reaching only .028%.

The three dominant areas of interest within the top ten search terms were fashion, hairstyles, activity and craft ideas and sweepstakes. Specifically, in rank order:

1. Back to school
2. Jonas Back to School sweepstakes
3. Back to school ideas
4. Back to school fashions
5. Back to school bulletin boards
6. Back to school activities
7. Back to school crafts
8. Welcome back to school activities
9. Back to school hairstyles
10. Back to school sweepstakes by target

Interestingly, several of these categories precipitated a 100% probability of clicking on a site:

1. Sweepstakes
2. Crafts
3. Activities

Moreover, every one of these searches had a high probability of resulting in a site visit.

The loser on the search rankings was paid search which contributed only four percent of the traffic to sites. This low showing suggests that there is a lot of room for improvement in the paid search arena for the back to school target group. The Hitwise analysis shows a highly motivated group of people who are ready to buy.

Marketers need to get busy testing wording to discover how to draw this well-primed group. Judging from the very high results from words like sweepstakes, crafts and activities, savvy marketers should consider how to use these words to draw a buying crowd.

It may make sense to add some child-ready activities to your site and promote them or run some type of contest that is described using the word sweepstakes. Although the economy has not yet turned around fully, especially judging by jobless numbers, there are enough other indicators of a turnaround to make it very worthwhile to aggressively target the back to school crowd.

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