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Transcript

Sorry about the brief pause there. So your speakers today, we’ve got, actually, I’m going to have to share my screen, aren’t I? Here we go. Okay. Can I get a quick reaction from the group if you can see my screen? Okay, great. Thank you. Renee. Awesome. Okay, so your speakers today actually let me back up since we’re recording now. Agenda for today, holiday trends that we saw in 2024 will then dive into three sub vertical trends. We’ll move into what we’re seeing within the earliest days of 2025. We’ll go through a little bit of a summit preview, and we’ll end on some Q&A.

Your speakers today. So you have Vivek Pandya, who is one of our directors from our ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Digital Insights team. It is him and his team that compiles a lot of this reporting. That is so useful to us in our retail, in consumer goods vertical customers and then myself. My name is Meredith Goodspeed. I’m a senior manager overseeing retail and consumer goods from our Ultimate Success team. So I’m going to go ahead and get started with our very first topic, which is the 2024 holiday results. I’m going to go ahead and pass it over to Vivek to go through that information.

Great. Thanks very much, Meredith. And, it’s great to be here with you all, to go over, what we saw during the 2024 holiday season. It was, I think, a season that we had a lot of curiosity about because of the way the overall year had performed and what we could have expected, given the Prime Day in October and the election and the sort of focus that was pulling. So there were a lot of trends informing what we could potentially see there. So as we kind of get into the top line growth, which I think we can shift over to the next slide, there we go. As you can see there, we saw 8.7% year on year growth. And that was quite strong, especially given everything the consumer has been tackling on the inflation front and making sure that they are able to spend on discretionary goods, given, the prices still increases on things like food, housing. So when we saw this sort of record, $241.4 billion in spend, that was a really strong emotion around how we ended the year. And there are a lot of trends that inform this uptick in the growth. So I would say price sensitivity discounts. We saw trends around social and marketing channel, driving momentum. We also saw mobile having a real strong moment this holiday season that we’ll get into. And then we’ll talk a little bit about AI trends that we saw. But just getting to where we saw with $241.4 billion, that helped us get over $1 trillion for the year 2024 for the first time. So we were able to get to $1.05 trillion, which is pretty, pretty strong performance on the online front. And so then kind of digging into that and we can kind of shift over and see that, the one of the main kind of drivers there was the was the mobile ship. So I think we can shift over to the next slide and look into mobile and then also these major shopping days. So even though consumers were seeing early discounts, we really saw them prioritizing, these major shopping days. So between our Cyber five or Cyber Week period, which we, which we view as being Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, because that’s where the consumers felt like they could get the strongest absolute deals. And we knew there was so much priority around that. And then when we think about how there was a shorter amount of time between Cyber Monday and Christmas, this past 2024 season, it becomes really clear that the spending velocity really kicked into high gear once we got to Thanksgiving, and then all the way up to Cyber Monday, where we saw record days for Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday. So good momentum there and allowed those continue those days to stay pretty dominant and make up about 17% of spend. And then when we shift over to the next kind of trend that we really focused on was, again, how these categories would do these major categories that make up e-commerce. So electronics, apparel, grocery has been on a strong growth trajectory. And many of these categories show pretty stable growth. When we think about apparel, that’s a category a couple of years ago during the holiday season that saw kind of flat to negative growth. So it was it was welcome development for us to see about 9.9% growth there and about $46 billion spent on apparel, 55.3 for electronics. So we really saw after we got past this sort of, election period, in the first couple of weeks of November and consumers really started to kick into gear, we we started to see really strong, robust spending across many of these categories. Cosmetics was another one at 12.2% that saw great growth, and it had performed quite well throughout 2024 with things like the lipstick effect and those types of, phenomena helping the category. So a good performance there from the major categories. And as we kind of shift over to additional trends and we look to the next slide here, mobile became a real priority for consumers this year. They’re very mobile dominant. And we saw about 5,054% growth. In terms of 54% share, sorry, in terms of mobile mobile revenue. And that accounted for about 12.7% growth year on year. So mobile growth really outstripping total online revenue growth. And the retailers who’ve invested in mobile experiences, prioritize getting consumers to shop on apps saw strong upside there because we have consumers spending a lot of time on mobile devices, on social media apps, discovering a lot of products, keeping an eye on deals. And a lot of that momentum was happening on mobile. So again, something that we’re going to have to talk about again for 2025 and how we continue to make gains there, given this sort of migratory motion around mobile spending that’s continue to kick up and is now we’re in a very mobile dominant world now. So then as we kick into the next trend, I think what became really clear for us was the impact price sensitivity would have in an inflationary environment like this. And what we found was price sensitivity accounted for a significant level of the boost that we saw during the holiday season. So a 1.39% boost in daily spending was just attributed to price sensitivity. So consumers really looking for those deals, those deal moments. And that accounted for an incremental $2.25 billion in spend. So the retailers that were very strategic in pricing, ensuring that their pricing was very dynamic and making sure that they’re taking the capitalizing on moments where audiences are looking for the best deals. They saw very strong upside here. And ultimately we see consumers use this holiday season to get the best deal. But then if they saw a strong enough deal, they even went into higher price tiers, because they saw that value. So when we think about the trajectory of discounts to the next slide over here, what we find is that many categories had strong discounts. But electronics, toys and televisions really, you know, led the way and good discounts for apparel. And even though we saw mild discounts kicking in in early November into late October, the best absolute discounts really became available during that Cyber Week. And given that consumers were very much perceiving those days to have the best discounts that helped, these major days continue to hold staying power and grow pretty effectively in the holiday season 2020. For now, when we think about the trajectory again, the discounts became available, even earlier in 2024 than they were in 2023. But they were milder. When we think about the, the the discounts kicking in on November 2nd up into November 4th, as I said, given that consumers were preoccupied with a lot of different things, we didn’t see the spend momentum follow suit there, but we did see it really kind of kick up and have an impact as we got to Thanksgiving week. Now, as we shift over to the other trends here, as we go over to this shifting, as I mentioned, that was very important because we saw a lot of consumers shift down to cheapest price tier goods throughout the year. But then the holiday season, they saw enough value there. They were in a stronger enough position at that point to then, shift into higher price tier categories, for goods and that’s good for driving up revenue, having consumers spend on these higher price tier goods, because in the holiday season, you want that to be essentially a tailwind to revenue growth. And we saw consumers in a strong enough position to have the ability to do that, especially if they’re giving gifts for family and friends. They were able to stretch a little more, especially across these major categories. Now, the other kind of trends that were very kind of key for us when we think about this is we continue to see popularity for Buy Now, pay later, buy now, pay later, as we saw this holiday season and kind of shifting over to the to the trajectory we saw that will will shift to the sort of slide we saw for that holiday season. And there we are. There it is. We see popularity for buy now, pay later, persist. So we saw 9.6% year on year growth. That’s about $18.2 billion processed through buy now, pay later. And ultimately we we see consumers now leaning on it because they see just the going through a mobile experience. They see it as an option as they go through the checkout, path. And that makes it pretty, appealing to them if they see that smaller amount there. And so while that we saw stronger growth with, buy now pay later in previous seasons when inflation was first kicking off, the momentum continues to persist there. And, kind of in contrast to that, we’ll shift over to, what we think, what we think about from the terms of bopis or click and collect, buy online pick up in store. That’s been trending down because you still have consumers who prioritize getting their gifts sent to them, you know, free shipping, quick delivery to their door. However, when consumers are in that crunch time, right up to Christmas Eve, that it becomes a pretty apparent to them that they’re not going to get their gift on time. So then they lean on bopis. And so, retailers that offer that definitely drove a lot of impact. On December 23rd and this last minute shopper out there. So then we’ll keep moving into the other trends that were very important to us. So when we think about key trends that inform people’s discovery and, you know, capitalizing on on meeting retailers, and I think we can jump into the marketing channel slide here. We saw good strong growth from the affiliate channel and especially social media influencers within that affiliate channel. So ultimately, consumers were still looking across social media apps. They were seeing promo codes, discount codes from certain influencers, and that was incentivizing them to spend through that channel. They were also taking advantage of plug ins that gave them additional discounts on browsers. So and you know, the these sort of, payback deals that they were getting from certain credit providers. So ultimately we, we see a consumer that really kind of prioritized discovery and discounts through the affiliate channel. We still saw growth from, other areas like paid search. And we do see them seeing pretty strong dominant revenue share from things like paid search and organic search. But really the growth was was pretty profound from what we call these social media influencers coming from the affiliate channel. And then as we shift over and deep dive deeper into that space, we can see that the social media affiliate converted nine times better than regular social media traffic coming to retail sites, so that exclusivity from a retail influencer, that that really benefited the consumer. And we saw much stronger conversion there. So it’s really, a opportunity for retailers to think about how they continue to grow their, partnerships with these influencers, because we see it really performing and over indexing regular social traffic channel. So, strong performance gains there. As we shift over to another story that became a hot topic in January, but was pretty important during the holiday season, we saw TikTok’s share of traffic really continue to surge about a 73.8% year on year increase. Again, it’s a much smaller base than these older players like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, but it was growing at quite a clip in the holiday season and Reddit, given how much they’ve improved in terms of driving AI across, their, their sort of different threads and chat threads that has helped drive traffic from Reddit, social traffic from Reddit to retail sites. So retailers have growth vectors here in some of these, social networks. Again, Instagram continue to grow its, year on year visit share. But ultimately, some of these older players were kind of, further back relative to TikTok and Reddit, some of these newer players on the scene. And then as we keep moving along into the broader trends we saw there, we saw high traffic referrals that was surging pretty quickly. And ultimately, that is traffic coming from the sort of, chat bots and chat systems that we saw consumers really relying on. So a lot of interesting trends that helped inform what these retailers saw on a deeper level, for the holiday season. And we’ll we’ll keep pushing along here and we’ll, we’ll shift into these broader trends specific for the categories and products and as we think about that, you know, these top categories, top products, they continue to perform through the season. We’ll shift this slide over there. You’ll see many of the top products that inform what we saw some strong growth drivers there, some on the weaker side, but still growth in a time where that wasn’t an absolute given during the holiday season. But there was good, good, good movement there. Let’s let’s keep shifting along and, take it to the major channels and Lego, some of these perennial favorites, the five for gaming. All these were doing quite well. When we think about additional products, the Dyson Airwrap, these were hot products that did seasonally quite well. And this is a line of sight that we get across this sort of aggregate view. And when we think about the growth of these different categories, I think it becomes very much about how your particular industry did and what the opportunity and upsides were there. So can we should we shift it over, to the sub vertical. And for that I’ll hand it over to Meredith. So why don’t you take it away? No. Thanks. So back okay, so the first sub vertical that we’re going to dive into is apparel. I just want to note before we dive into apparel, that the data here that you’re seeing on the slide on the bottom half is taken from the median ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ customer. So please note that as we go through each of these sub vertical deep dives. So starting with apparel there’s a few key takeaways that I’ll take you through. And then we’re going to go through a few additional slides on each of the sub verticals. And again there will be three in total. So for apparel specifically what we really saw, more than anything was that the calendar did not flatten, meaning it was very similar to the revenue that was that was generated in the 2023 season, looking at November and December specifically. But as Vivek mentioned earlier, revenue was even more focused on that Thanksgiving week. A lot of it, kind of coming back to that idea of price sensitivity and individuals really looking for those higher discount days. Mobile similar to what Vivek said, in this specific sub vertical mobile is dominant. So driving about 85% of the traffic. What’s interesting here is that, it really lags, sorry, lags performance in terms of conversion when compared to desktop. So it’s really important to ensure, if you’re working in the apparel industry to understand how you can optimize that mobile experience, how you can take down barriers that are stopping people from converting on mobile. To increase relative to conversion and to push customers more towards your own channels. Looking at own channels specifically, they really drove the majority of traffic and revenue. And in apparel in particular, is reliant on returning customers. So really important to design compelling customer journeys for those returning customers and to bring in that new customers. Also really important to focus in on how your loyalty programs are playing into this. You’ll see that we’ve got those specific statistics along the bottom there. I’m not going to go through that for each sub vertical. You can take a look at it. If this is the sub vertical that applies, Geo will also be sending out the recording of this. So you’ll have access to it. And you can do a comparison of your specific organization’s metrics compared to again the median ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ customer within the apparel sub vertical.

So doing a little bit of a double click, I’m realizing I was on the wrong side. And apologies everyone. I’m driving it from the screen. Doing a little bit of a double click into the calendar. So like I mentioned before, we did not experience any flattening in the retail, holiday season this year. Meaning we still saw similar spikes that we saw in 2023. Again, Thanksgiving week was huge. It made up about 21% of total October through December spend slightly more than what we saw in 2023.

But still similar types of peaks. November and December made up about 24% of annual spend. Again, similar to what we saw in 2023. So, some major takeaways here is that across the e-commerce ecosystem, customers are really more primed than ever to find deals during Cyber Week, similar to what Vivek said in the upfront of this. So really important for apparel retailers to really effectively hone in on their strategies during that discounting time frame and really be designing customer journeys that maximize traffic during Cyber Week, but also really funnel customers directly to you versus shopping around during that high discount time when people are more willing to shop and are really opening up their share of wallet during that cyber five.

Moving on into mobile. So similarly to what we saw in the macro trends, mobile is dominant. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s performance in terms of converge and really does live compared to desktop, 85% of traffic is on mobile devices. The revenue is still tilted towards mobile revenue. Desktop, is more than two times the desktop visit share. So what you’ll see here is mobile is still dominant in terms. If you look on the left side of this, mobile web and mobile app is still dominant in terms of visit, share and revenue share. But when you actually look at conversion rate on the right here, this is where we’re seeing desktop pull ahead. So really important to hone in on what does your mobile strategy look like. We know customers are wanting to shop there more and more. How can you break down those barriers? How can you really do a hard analysis on what’s stopping people from converting and ensuring that we’re driving up conversion rate on mobile as well? Moving into own channels, own channels are particularly important for apparel. Email and direct mail make up about 57% of the visit. Share and 46% of revenue share. So this is more than across retail in general. If you are an apparel retailer, it’s really, really important to develop these strong apps that customers want to use when they need new clothing. And again, developing these very compelling customer journeys and loyalty programs to ensure people are funneled back to you. As Vivek mentioned earlier, affiliate traffic is really outperforming other sources. Really strong engagement, really strong conversion, really strong average order value. As a result, its revenue share is more than two and a half times its visit share. I personally am somebody who has definitely fallen victim to many affiliate links. So I think it’s really critical to make sure. How is your affiliate strategy playing into your, your mobile strategy, your app strategy, your merchandizing strategy overall. And if you don’t have a strong affiliate program as an apparel retailer, that’s something that should very strongly be considered as you move into the rest of 2025 and especially the holiday season next year.

Diving into our specialty category. So specialty, you might be asking yourself what qualifies a specialty? I know I did when I first started working in retail a while back. So this is a wide range of categories. It can be anything from jewelry to home and beauty to leisure gifts, flowers, office supplies, stationery. So just know that this is a little bit more of a broad category. Similar to apparel, the retail calendar, for specialty did not flatten slightly higher share of annual revenue was generated this year compared to last, and revenue, again was focused on that cyber five week, that Thanksgiving week time, that shopping grid, mobile is still dominant in this channel, driving about 75% of traffic. Mobile web in particular, underperforms channels underline really the importance of that app presence within this space. So that’s a little bit different and a little bit more nuanced than the, the retail apparel. Some verticals specifically, earned channels, search and affiliate drive, a majority of the revenue. Again, that’s a little bit different than what we saw in apparel as well. And returning customers drive a smaller than average share. So this is nuanced and different than what we see in, in apparel, but really underscores the importance of capturing new customers and really highlighting the opportunity to gain that competitive advantage by designing really, really compelling customer journeys and really strong loyalty programs so that you are maintaining that customer base that you are bringing in.

Looking at Cyber Week specifically, as I mentioned earlier, following the same pattern as 2023, really strong spikes that we saw during that cyber five week, it makes up about 13% of total Q4 spend. So a little bit less than what we saw on apparel, and a little bit marginally more than what we saw in 2023. So revenue shifting a little bit later in the season, which is, again, a very specific nuance to this sub vertical, and it made up about 20% of annual spend. And so a little bit less than what we saw in the apparel category. So really important to hone in on effective discounting strategies that really capitalize on Cyber Week. And again, customer journeys. It is critical to be building customer journeys that maximize traffic during Cyber Week, when customers have that higher propensity to convert.

Looking at mobile, specifically, app traffic is outperforming other sources. So 75% of traffic was on a mobile device, but only 59% of our revenue was generated on mobile. This is, this is specifically because of poor performance on mobile web engagement conversions and average order value, as you can see on the bottom right. Not just desktop, but also mobile apps. So mobile app is actually outperforming desktop in terms of engagement and conversion, which you can see on these two bottom graphs. So the key takeaway here really is the importance of developing strong apps and really building out a strong omnichannel experience that meet customers where they are. Unlike apparel, search is actually the dominant channel here. Search is is pulling in the plurality of visits and revenue for this specialty category. Affiliate traffic again, popping up here, really important. Better engagement and better conversions than any other channel. So really important to make sure that you’re honing in on your affiliate program, making sure that that’s in place. The key takeaways here for for specialty specifically is emphasizing the development of Discovery Channel. So affiliate search as mentioned here, that can help you capture those new audiences and really gain a competitive advantage with compelling customer journeys and loyalty programs for those first time visitors and purchases.

And lastly, we’re going to go into Superstore and Grocery. Before we talk a little bit more about trends that we saw in 2025. So looking at this superstore and grocery category, this one is a little bit different, compared to the last two. So superstore and grocery, you see more muted spikes during Cyber Week than peers. Especially in specialty and apparel. This makes sense. Big sale days. We’re looking for a gift for somebody or for ourselves. Might not be necessarily to go to a grocer for that. Mobile is dominant, so driving about 65 to 70% of online traffic and revenue, app is particularly excelling here with strong engagement and conversion rates underlining the importance of building that mobile optimized channel owned channels and the specific sub vertical. So driving the majority of the traffic and revenue. So grocery and superstars are particularly reliant on returning customers, further emphasizing the importance of designing those compelling customer journeys and those loyalty programs.

Looking at the Cyber Week spikes again, you’ll see here, compared to the past two sub verticals, that the spikes are a little bit more muted, and Superstore Grocery, not really a flattening, throughout the holiday season, but it did throughout the year specifically. So Thanksgiving is made up of about 11%, of total October through December spend, similar to what we saw in 2023. This is flatter than other categories that we saw, like I mentioned in apparel, or specialty November and December only made up about 21% of our annual spend. So that’s actually down from what we saw in 2023. This is the first time that we have seen this compared to the other sub sub verticals that I just went through. So the key takeaway here really is, visits and purchase propensity don’t necessarily spike sharply as some other categories during the cyber five time. But there’s an opportunity to really capitalize on deals earlier in the season. And as you can see from this graph, as we go into mobile specifically for superstore and grocery, over two thirds of traffic was on mobile devices. And while desktop and web traffic drives better engagement and higher conversion than mobile web, mobile app actually performs desktop web, which is kind of bucking the retail trend in general. As a result, mobile app traffic only drives about 17% of traffic. It generates about 34% of total revenue, and revenue is pretty evenly split between desktop and mobile, web and mobile app. As you can see here, outperformance is much higher in superstore and grocery than the average e-commerce category. So it’s really important to make sure if you’re in superstore and grocery, you are really developing strong apps. You are building out omnichannel experiences that meet customers where they are. This is one that I can say from personal experience. I pull up the app for one of my grocery stores every time I am in it, because not only does it help me find the deals, but also helps me navigate to the right aisle and where I can find the products I’m looking for quickly, which I need to do because I usually have a two and a four year old with me, so it’s very helpful. I know a lot of people who do the same thing. Strong apps are critical, especially in grocery.

And then moving on to own channels. Particularly important for superstore and grocery, they make up about for direction email specifically make up about 62% of visit share and 47% of revenue share. This is more than e-commerce in general within this category. Affiliate traffic still outperforming really strong engagement and conversion of average order value. As you can see here, its revenue share is about 2.5 times its opposite share. So really strong affiliate across all three of these categories is really important to make sure you have an affiliate strategy stood up. Social traffic is making up a smaller share of visits in revenue than other e-commerce categories. So those two, in contrast, are pretty interesting. But making sure that you have a strong affiliate, strategy is important, really important to develop strong apps. As I mentioned before. So customers can really turn to you when they think of a purchase and develop really compelling customer journeys. That’s a red thread through all three of these categories, making sure that your customer journey strategy is solid so that they are coming to you in that time. And again, loyalty programs. So those was that was a really quick deep dive on three of the sub verticals. I’m going to go ahead and pass it back to the back to talk about early 2020, 2025 trends that we’re seeing.

Great. Thanks, Meredith. And I think we can, dive into 2025, but we will do it, especially with the context of, again, we had a very strong holiday season. It was characterized by strong mobile growth. We saw a lot of social discovery of items on on social media platforms with affiliate partners and influencers. And then we saw generative AI traffic essentially surge, to many of these retail sites as consumers were starting to lean on them for ideating and coming up with ideas and then making their way to these retail sites from the chat assistant platforms. So again, those were some really strong trends in the holiday season. I would say January we we kind of went off to a pretty tough start really, because when we think about, what January look like, we have to think can keep in mind that California makes up about 13% of online spending. And with the wildfires and the weather events happening there, that really drove down online spending from the state down, and that had a profound impact on the top line growth. Additionally, when you have events and moments like that that, you know, really capture the attention of the entire country, that can have an effect on consumers desire to spend their focus around spending. And they can sometimes say, okay, well, instead of, you know, spending on on this item, I’m going to maybe go to a charity site and donate that. Those types of effects do have a profound impact on, the sort of spending levels we, we saw for the month. The other factor that we think about is the discounts definitely weaken. You know, the holiday season discounts, kind of dissipated. And we started, you know, getting back to regular price levels, coming on into the off season. And so you, but you still have consumers having to deal with higher prices, you know, in certain sectors. I think there’s been a lot of talk about, you know, prices of eggs and things like that. And housing, continues to be elevated. So then you you don’t have that helping drive up more discretionary spending. And then lastly, January didn’t have too many events, outside of, some MLK sales, MLK weekend sales that we saw. You really see consumers rallying around these events, Presidents Day, Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, all of that happened in February, but unfortunately that that wasn’t able to help January. So that’s why we got to the 2.5% growth in January. And it has implications for what we could see in February.

And then as we think about what that means for Q1 guidance, Q2, I think it it really focuses us around the growth factors that we are really recommending. Many, retailers and many people across industries prioritize, which is there. There is persistent price sensitivity out there. So being very dynamic around prices, understanding where your audience stands around price thresholds can likely get some of these consumers over the line and buying during these off season periods. The other kind of takeaway is that we have, again, strong kind of, trust in some of these influencers by certain audiences. So when they’re when they’re spending time on social media apps, they’re really checking in on some of these influencers they follow. They’re really looking at some of these partners that give them additional promo codes. So ensuring that there’s a strong affiliate strategy at play there is is key. As as both myself and Meredith reinforced. And then you’ve heard us talk a lot about mobile during this past hour. And the reason for that is because even though we see continued migration and stronger spending on mobile devices, conversion rates still lag the laptop desktop pretty significantly. And so that can be a real challenge for retailers trying to drive revenue growth. If you’re mobile conversion is down relative to laptop and desktop. So you really want to get your conversion rate on par or higher than laptop and desktop, so that as more and more share gets, you know, shifted to mobile, your revenue growth experiences, more of a tailwind from mobile versus a headwind. So that’s that’s very key there. The other exciting trend that is an opportunity for retailers is you see consumers leaning on generative AI for all different types of use cases. And shopping. Retail shopping is fast becoming one of them, where they’re using it for ideas, you know, what do I get so and so for Valentine’s Day? What do I get? So I’m someone for Mother’s Day or something like that. And then they’re essentially being served with links to different retail sites. And that traffic is starting to surge. And so you have a more engaged consumer who’s asked questions about, you know, prices about free delivery around, you know, the cheapest versions of goods, things like that. And that consumer is then coming on to retail sites and converting effectively. So the opportunity for retailers is to really optimize so that they’re picked up by these chat bots as options for the consumer versus someone else. And there’s multiple ways to do that. One, really showcase your differentiation versus others. What do you offer that’s a benefit to the consumer. The other is to really think about and couple it with the affiliate piece. Because if I say, what’s the top ten best pair of jeans? What’s the best pair of jeans I can buy out there? Best is subjective, but chatbot is going to go across the internet and see these top ten best lists and things like that, or look across social media chatter and see best of recommendations for that product. And it’s going to pull that in. So, you know, coupling some of these strategies together can be very important. And the last call out is being very nimble to the current environment we’re in. As I said, the fires had a very strong impact into top line spending in January. So if you can imagine, if you have an audience of cohorts that you’re targeting in California back in January, prior to the fires and all that, you would have had to shift very quickly to account for how how significant of a drop in online spending growth that was. So really ensuring that you’re able to shift your marketing mix. Really, adjust your geo targeting so that you can really prioritize areas where the consumer will be more willing to spend and where your conversion rates are stronger. So that ends up being a lot of our Q1 guidance. And I think that that probably gives a good continuity between everything we saw during the holiday season up until where we are now. And and just a little bit of a preview for February is we, as I said, did have some of these moments like Super Bowl, like Valentine’s Day, like President’s Day, and that help things. And we are starting to see California growth recover on the online front. So, I’ll wrap that up from there. But, Meredith, you want to take it up for Q&A or Tom. We’re going to move over to summit. So summit summit. Q&A. So summit is upon us. There is a lot more amazing insights that are going to be shared at summit, both from an industry perspective, but also how you can leverage these insights with the solutions that you have from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. So please mark your calendars. If you’re not already attending, please sign up to attend. There are options to attend Live in Vegas, which I would highly recommend. Having gone in my past life as a client and now going as an ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ employee, it is hands down one of the best events of the year. You learn so much, you’re inspired by so much. You get to meet and network with people from other companies, other retailers who are going after these big, meaty problems similar to you and really discuss how they’re approaching it. Their hands on labs. Amazing, amazing experience if you go in person. But if you do not have the budget or can’t get approved to go in in person, there are there is an online option available as well. March 17th for the pre conference, 18th, 19th and 20th for the primary portion of that. Again, like I mentioned online, but also in Las Vegas, there’s links. So you can go to summit uh.adobe.com where you can register for in-person or virtual. And then there’s a session catalog you can look up. There are specific retail tracks. And I highly recommend you take a look at that. I’ll pop that up on the screen in a few slides as well, so you can understand what retail tracks are specifically available for you. And then a huge list of amazing speakers is really, really inspirational. And sneaks will be happening as well, where you get to see kind of a little bit behind the curtain of what ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ has been working on. And, and the major feature announcements that will be coming out at summit.

One of the great sessions that you can attend is added summit. So if you loved hearing the back today speak, which I always do love hearing any of the any type of insight he can bring to me, you have the opportunity to watch him speak at summit. Talking about top customer experience trends. Presenting that with Adam Justice, our senior director of product marketing. So amazing opportunity. That’s going to be on the Wednesday of summit in the morning.

And just to pop over to the retail agenda, there is a lot happening for retail. Full days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Again. Couple this with our mainstage sessions. Sneaks a lot of inspirational sessions, hands on labs, and opportunities to really network with others within the retail and consumer goods space to understand how they might be tackling problems different than you in your company, to really drive inspiration and uplevel how you are showing up in the market. So highly recommend! Please do register for summit. I highly recommend going in person. And if you’re unable to go in person and then the online option will provide you, great opportunities as well.

Okay, so without further ado, we’ve got a few minutes left for Q&A. So I’m actually going to stop sharing my screen for Q&A for a second because I for some reason, can’t access the questions. And that’s a problem. So instead of looking at our help wanted sign, you have the joy of just looking at myself and Vivek.

Okay, so we’ve pulled some questions. From the chat. We’ve also got some, some questions that came in prior. So I’m going to go ahead and moderate. Vivek, if there’s any questions that you want to say, let’s circle back on that, please let me know. How are we defining premium products? This individual heard higher price, but would be interested to know how this is defined other than just higher price. It’s a great question that we we look across a lot of different products and get a lot of insights around the levels that they’re at, and but for for the for this particular study, we were looking at premium from the lens of the some of the higher quartile price ranges. So we look across certain products and the spectrum that they land on in terms of the low end, high end, and price is the driver there because it allows us to kind of group group different items very quickly. And then tell a broader story around how people are shifting around discretionary goods, around price. But ultimately, we will open up this analysis. I think you’ll see in future reports. Well, we’ll dig into specific categories and different variants of premium items. And that will inform not just be informed, not by just price, but how these how these particular categories are positioning these products overall. And, you know, we’re also hoping to get into income level data in the future. That could help, you know, showcase the the tastes and trends around certain income groups picking certain products versus others.

Great. The next question, I’ll take, and this is what is the forecast for consumers appetite to use AI agents for product discovery, customer service, etc… So in the very beginning of the macro transaction, Vivek spoke to that huge growth that we saw in individuals using those gen AI sources to help them with their shopping needs. Again, the opportunity to couple that with that affiliate strategy. So what we can say is, what it’s what it’s going to be in the future. Not sure this is on the breaking edge of what we’re seeing, but the holiday season referrals to retail sites from an AI source increased about 1,300% year over year. That’s a huge increase. Again, this is nil. This is just popping out, compared to past years right now. So will that percentage increase slow down? Probably. But it is still going to be huge. So I think that’s the number that we can go off of right now. But we do anticipate it to continue to be a huge emphasis of something that you can leverage as a retailer. So that is there anything you would add to that? Yeah, I think the surge is very indicative of, you know, a couple of years ago it wasn’t even possible to get links out from these major chat platforms, out to sites or out to other sources. Now they’re showcasing it prominently to the user users now clicking through them after they, you know, do this pre research like what are the best options. Where can I buy this. Where can I buy that. And now they’re clicking through. And we’re seeing retailers and industry benefit from that. And this is even before these insights are showcasing even before the announcement a couple of weeks ago that was made around operators. And how many of these platforms are introducing a level of support that allow consumers to just, you know, put out a request and the chat bot will really, you know, take it from there, essentially, and close out that entire purchase or reservation or something like that. But ultimately, this and what we’re continue to look at is traffic from these sources, from users and the behaviors associated there. And we’re going to dig in a lot more in that summit around that. So stay tuned for more on that from okay.

Great. I think we have time for a few more questions. One of the questions we got in the chat pod was is electronics, mostly Apple products and TVs. Yeah, I would say that we we look at the entire categories, and our sample is informed by an aggregate data set from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Analytics, where, you know, we were able to get an opt in in data set across products and categories because we’re able to provide benchmarking to our clients and customers around how their conversion rates at bounce rates, all that looks relative to their competitor and peer set. And so in that sense, we’ve been able to get a very comprehensive view on electronics on overall top line performance. And obviously you do have some of these products seasonally that do well Apple related products. The televisions have seen a lot of momentum based on continued consumer appetite to larger television screens. I think the average was for a Super Bowl was around 73in. So you’re seeing as the prices come down is there’s more competition, consumers leaning into all these different types of products that inform the electronics category. But you still do see momentum around, you know, wearables, things like that.

Great. I’m always looking for a new wearable. Okay. One of the next questions I think I can take this is, would like to understand more on the insight on email rev share moderately declining. What’s included in that? So as SMS messages are captured in the email newsletter category for our marketing channel analysis, just to make sure that’s clear, push notifications are not currently reflected in the analysis. But, I know that the team is currently exploring app based channels. The holiday season, we did see moderately declining email newsletter revenue share, but that’s primarily being driven by a decline in email revenue share on desktop specifically. So keep that in. Note, as we’ve seen, mobile devices gain about 2% of email newsletter marketing share in 2024, so definitely need to be looking at the channel there.

We’ll take one more question. Is there insight on how users prefer to shop by end use price point, team, etc.? Yeah, it’s it’s something that we think a lot about because what what starting to emerge are these are these broader trends around where the consumer is currently and the core being, you know, there is priority of on price and then understanding what’s available to them. You they have so many options in the online marketplace. So then it becomes things like, you know, do they get free delivery. They get do they get, you know, next day delivery things like that. That’s important to the consumer. But then ultimately when they’re discs covering these items, you know, it’s it’s shifting from just being sort of the traditional, oh, I saw, you know, this billboard and now I want this product to consumers day to day, spending a lot of time on mobile apps on their smartphones and discovering products through social media, through platforms that allow them to get line of sight through these sort of ads in mobile environments, and then be able to say, okay, yeah, I’m ready to buy. And if they have the app for that, that retailer, that’s even better, because they’re very much looking for speed and efficiency in all areas of their lives. And retail is no different. And so being able to then get some of those items through their preferred retailer of choice, it becomes important. And this is another reason why pricing becomes crucial. Because yes, maybe, you know, you’re you’re a bit challenged in trying to get the price point down for certain products. But if you can view it through the lens of lifetime value and bringing that user and consumer into your ecosystem, into versus someone else’s, then you can then reengage that consumer, have an ongoing relationship with them. So they’re not just checking in with you when the best deals are out there, when it’s a sales moment, but have a consistent basis of, of income, expendable income directed your way versus someone else. So all that’s to say, I would say discovery is key part here. And that social generative AI, those areas are helping on that front. And then mobile experience to drive conversion and then price. You know you’re really ticking the box there for the consumer. So those are the themes that we’ve seen emerge in a pretty strong way.

Awesome. Thanks for that, Vivek. Okay. With that. We are just at about time. So if you have additional questions and you didn’t get a chance to ask them or we didn’t get a chance to answer them, please follow up with your ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ representative. They will put you in contact with somebody who can, or they will be a conduit to provide the answers. This webinar will be posted so you guys can all have access to it. Bring it back to your teams to help drive any additional strategies that you’re discussing. But thank you all for joining. Really appreciate the attendance. Really appreciate the questions that have come through. And as always, we’re always here as your partner to help you as you define your strategy and move through the rest of your year. And I hopefully look forward to seeing a lot of you at Summit.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you. I.