Why Amazon Australia’s Christmas numbers don’t add up

I want to talk to you this week about Amazon and the recent launch of Amazon Go stores in the US, as well as the retailer’s arrival in Australia. The Australian Financial Review recently published a story that said Amazon’s Australian traffic rose almost 81% between last November and December, based on statistics collected by Nielsen.

Now, that would have been an extraordinary feat, so I took a look at how Nielsen collected this data. One of the main ways they do this is through the use of audience panels, using a proprietary method of probability sampling. In other words, using a small sample to predict what a large group of people will think or do.

Me, I’m using trusty Google Trends. I’d much rather have the actual data than a small sample that tries to predict that same data. What the Nielsen numbers are showing is Amazon’s false launch — when it came to their actual launch, fewer people were looking for them. When we took a look at Google Trends for the period of time we’re talking about, they had a big spike followed immediately by an even bigger drop off. When you start looking for retailers with big sales during November and beyond, Kmart eclipsed everyone. After that, the big winners were the large grocery store brands, which make sense because of the nature of the holidays.

The bottom line is: if you want to find out how your brand is doing, don’t rely on sampling and trends. Focus on building your brand and the conversion rates will follow. The more people you can convince to talk about you in relation to your target keywords, the higher you’ll end up ranking for those keywords.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au. 

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