Holiday Search Trends: How Directions Clicks, Website Clicks Are Set To Change For Businesses Over The Holidays

The holiday season is one of the busiest times of the year for most businesses as they look to manage holiday-specific offerings, increased order demand, and support needs — at a time when customers make more searches and engage with businesses more often online.

To help businesses to get a better handle on how they'll need to update holiday hours, ensure the correct number of support staff, and keep up to date with location data, Yext ran a case study to project search engine click trends for the holiday season this December.

Using data from our own Search Data Hub, we took a look at four years of historical trends across search engine clicks for Driving Directions, Phone Calls, and Website Clicks — as well as current year performance in September and October. From there, we projected how click volume will change in December 2022, in a year-over-year comparison to 2021.

The takeaway? The high level results showed a shift toward users engaging with Driving Direction Clicks this holiday season (+15.2% YoY), and away from Phone Call Clicks (-14.1% YoY) and Website Clicks (-10% YoY). What does this signal? Consumers seem more willing than ever to go shop, eat, transact, socialize, and explore in-person, and this could be a good sign for consumers — and businesses — to be prepared for heightened foot traffic in the coming months.*

Now, let's dive into some industry-specific digital trends for the holiday season.

It makes sense to start with the retail sector, as Q4 months can largely influence annual plans due to the sheer volume in holiday gifting.

The retail sector is showing very promising numbers for Driving Direction Clicks (+15.6% YoY), and declines for both Phone Call Clicks (- 20%) and Website Clicks (-14.6%) relative to last year. When digging into geographies, volatility seems to be even higher in North America where Direction Clicks are sharply up (+24.7%) and Website Clicks are largely flat (-2.7%). These trends seem to indicate that shoppers are going to test the shopping waters in-person after two years of closures and Covid concerns. This also points to a possible reduced demand for call support staff, and a resource shift to the in-store battleground.

Within retail, the sub-sectors that seem headed for major foot traffic in November and December include Clothing (+44%) Consumer Electronics (+29%), Luggage and Travel Goods (+51.8%), and Toys & Games (+35.8%), which are all seeing major increases in Driving Directions Clicks. This data seems to confirm that many of the typical holiday gift categories should see a strong close to the year, as retailers enjoy a full season of being in-stock after 2021 and 2020 supply shocks.

In contrast, retail sub-industries that might see a YoY slowdown in growth or even declines are Books (+11.7% YoY), Sporting Goods (-3.2%), and Furniture (-9.3%), according to search engine click trends. This could signal a shift away from a quiet DIY holiday at home and more toward travel and group outings.

Keeping with this theme, we are seeing large positive trends in food and foods services for Driving Direction Clicks (+22.1% YoY). The major drivers within the Food sector are QSRs (+30.7%) and Sit-Down Restaurants (+24.1%), as consumers might push to eat out more than the pandemic-impacted winters of 2021 and 2020.

Related to this trend are major rebounds in the nightlife and bar sector for Driving Direction Clicks (+58.8%) and Website Clicks (+18.3%). Chalk this up as a sign that Friendsgivings, holiday parties, and New Year's bashes may see a shift from at-home to out-and-about in a welcome change this holiday season. It also suggests that these businesses might want to create optimized landing pages for holiday events, holiday menus, special holiday rental offerings for parties, and the like — as it appears that customers are looking online for this information.

In a similar vein, the Hospitality and Travel sector should expect increases in in-person visitors with Driving Direction Clicks increasing (+28.3% YoY). However, what we might see is a short-term trend, as Website Clicks are projected to decline (-9.9%). This could point to more people traveling to their pre-booked travel destinations this holiday season than in the previous two years, but future bookings may decline as consumers pull back after a busy 2022.

Finally, an underrated piece of the holidays is how it impacts financial services firms, with year-end transactions affecting the future Tax season. Financial services is one of the few sectors where we are seeing increases across all click types, with Driving Direction Clicks (+37.5% YoY), Phone Call Clicks (+4.3%), and Website Clicks (+8.4%) all projected to spike. Part of the explanation for this could be increased bookings with financial advisors to best clear up portfolios heading into 2022 and consumers taking out extra cash for last-minute gifting.

These insights should all point to the need for businesses to prepare for a projected increase in demand for in-store visits, as the holiday season is already here and consumers are eager to get out of the house. Further, all businesses will need to have their location data updated and accurate wherever your consumers search for you — or you'll miss out on the benefits of those directions clicks during this crucial holiday season.

*All percentages come from an average of existing Yext clients' search engine click data from the last 4 years of September - October. From there, we take the rates of change for September 2022 and October 2022 and apply those rates to the upcoming 2022 holiday season (November - December).