Valentine’s Day Online Consumer Spend Statistics and Search Trends

The prominence of online and digital channels is one of the key factors in the continuously increasing Valentine’s Day spend for the past 5 years. Paul McCartney’s message in his song “Can’t Buy Me Love” seems to be lost in this digital age, and this isn’t such a bad thing if you’re in the business of playing web cupid.

Let’s look at some numbers: 

More shoppers are turning to search engines to help them find the perfect gift. Valentine’s Day search spikes now start earlier and last longer than ever before. I took some relevant keywords in Google’s data** and calculated the percentage of decrease or increase of search for the month of February. Here’s how it turned out:

Some takeaways…

• Valentine’s Day spend should continue its trend upwards in the future as more digital channels continue to rise. Spending for digital and search marketing should also see an increase, so you should keep in step with your competitors.
• Social Media popularity seems to be proportional with Valentines spending, as people are compelled to share Valentine’s activity in various social platforms. Social pressure from these feeds also help convince others to do something extra special (spend more) for this day.
• Consider getting your Ecommerce site to join in the Valentines trend and find relevant products to promote for these special occasions even if you are in an outside niche.
• Info-based blog posts containing Valentines gift ideas should get some traffic as more people search for that unique item that will make this day special. So consider writing one with a slight promotional tone.
• It’s time to create Valentine’s day themed ad copies and banners for social media & Adwords.
• Power up your Pinterest ads with gift ideas for men as the demographic in this social platform is predominantly female.

Sources:
https://nrf.com/media/press-releases*
Google Trends | Internal Google Data**