‘Tis The Season For… Engagement Rings???
Posted: November 24th, 2009 | Author: Lauren Sherman | Filed under: Retail, online retail, shopping | Tags: Blue Nile, engagement rings, online shopping | 2 Comments »
Flat screen TVs. Netbook computers. Zhu Zhu Pets. These are the items I imagine shoppers searching frantically for in the days prior to Thanksgiving, and more importantly, Black Friday. And while I may be right, there’s another item that sees a noticeable bump in interest come late November, and that’s the engagement ring.
Bill Tancer, the general manager over at Hitwise, a firm that follows search and advertising trends on the Internet, says that Web searches for engagement rings peak around November 24 each year. These Google charts confirm his findings.
Here’s the Google traffic for the search term “engagement rings” for 2006, when Tancer discovered the pattern:
Here it is for 2008:
And for 2009:
Indeed, 1 out of 5 engagements happen in December, according to statistics provided by online jeweler Blue Nile. So it’s no surprise that when I met with its CEO Diane Irvine and corporate communications director John Baird last week, they confirmed that this is the company’s busiest quarter for both advertising and sales. Some 70% of Blue Nile’s sales are generated by diamond rings, primarily used for engagements or anniversaries.
There’s also no doubt that this year, many on the hunt are searching for more affordable alternatives. According to Google Trends, searches for “silver engagement rings” have increased significantly since September 2009. The good news is, company’s like Blue Nile now offer “build your own ring” services that allow future fiancés to find the perfect ring at a manageable price.
But what might be the most telling bit of information culled from this exercise is that 60% of visitors in search of engagement rings on jewelry sites during the last four weeks were women, not men, according to Hitwise. So while men may be making most of the purchases, we can infer that more women may have a say in what their engagement ring looks like that we–at least I–assumed. Here’s Tancer’s graph of the data:
