65% of adults are spending less on non essentials. UK consumer confidence remained below -40 for the 9th month in a row in January marking the longest period of pessimism in 50 years!
Even Google is getting in on the pessimism announcing today that 12,000 jobs will be cut, following yesterdays announcement that there’s a market expectation of only a 7% increase in revenue. “You can expect to see this translate to a fall in ROAS and an increase in CPC.” Said Economist and Dream Agility CTO Glyn Powditch . They’re the second search Engine this week to announce big cuts, Microsoft recently announced 10,000 jobs to go.
Following on the heels of the disappointing US retail sales announced yesterday in the WSJ and FT, today the same has been announced in the UK retail sector. British retail sales dropped unexpectedly in December, by 1% which is well below the 0.5% forecast. Black Friday failed to produce a significant bump in sales. This was hot on the back of a 0.5% drop in November.
Non food sales fell by 2.1% from November to December 2022. Clothing store sales volumes were up 1% and furniture increased by 1.5%. Toys, cosmetics, jewellery and sports equipment was 6.2% down.
But is online fashion in free fall? Just this week we’ve seen Shein, the darling of fast fashion look to do a $3bn raise which would cut their valuation from $100bn to $64bn, BooHoo is forecasting double digit drops in sales.
If you’re considering cutting budgets as a business, don’t’, please talk to us first. Our clients who had already enjoyed the boost of moving onto Google Pmax, got between 30-46% increase in sales, with either a drop in spend, maintaining spend or a very small increase in spend. If you’re using Search 360, you may have put off a move to P Max due to the technology not being compatible with it. Our agile proprietary tech already had a lot of the functionality to deal with the challenges of setting up and running P Max campaigns to the retailers best advantage. Google continually changing best practise guidelines has not helped retailers achieve the best sales possible. We don’t suffer from these problems due to our approach and technical capabilities. We can offer you a free audit to check that those uplifts would be available to you before you have to commit to anything. The best thing about a P Max re structure is you don’t have to wait months for the results, it pays off in 4-6 weeks.
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