Holiday 2023 Insights: Predict Your Busiest Days, Traffic Surges With The Search Data Hub

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

But while most businesses know to expect a rush around the holiday season, getting granular insights about what customers might be looking for — and on what days they might visit stores or place orders — is more challenging.

Access to these insights can help businesses decide when (and how) to update their holiday hours, manage their location information, and bring in additional staff to serve more visitors. That's why we created our Search Data Hub to help you get them.*

In it, you can sort by industry (and sub-industry) to see how key metrics for your business listings and web pages tend to shift during the holiday season — and what they're likely to do this year. That way, you can be prepared for days that your listings engagement might rise, what days you might expect an influx of direct clicks and visits to your locations, and much more.

Knowledge is power, and it all helps you to show up in search — and in person — when your customers need you the most.

Below, we've called out a few general stats you should know for 2023.

1. Expect physical foot traffic to your locations: Only 40% of this holiday's engagement will come through ecommerce — and the other 60% will come through brick-and-mortar (based on actions to Listings). This means that more customers will be looking at your listings and depending on them to decide when and how to visit your business — so you need to make sure that all of your listings are accurate and up-to-date before the holiday rush.

Specifically, health and personal care are among the retail sub-verticals that will see the least amount of ecommerce traffic as a percentage of total engagement (21%) — which means the majority of their traffic (79%) comes through the real-world front door. Perhaps more people are ready for in-person experiences after several pandemic years that pushed digital activities, so make sure you're staffed accordingly.

2. Make sure you manage your businesses' location information: In a trend tied to the one above, clicks for directions to physical locations are going up over the holidays — and they will see a 17% seasonal surge (based on September 2022 compared to Nov and Dec 2022). So, make sure that your NAP (name, address, phone) data is up to date in advance of the busiest days you see in the dashboard — and continue managing your listings through the holiday season so that your customers get the information they need.

3. Don't neglect your website: While physical business visits are leading the way this holiday season across many sectors, our research still shows that department stores, clothing stores, and jewelry and leather goods stores will still see a surge to both ecommerce and foot traffic during the holidays. As such, make sure you update your website (as needed) in addition to your listings: are there landing pages you should create for special holiday events or sales? Are your FAQs and/or chat experiences ready to go if shoppers have questions?

Customers today expect great omnichannel experiences all year long, but the bar is highest at the holidays — so take this as a sign to continue investing in your online and offline presence.

1. Ecommerce will see a surge for most verticals, so prepare your web pages: 55-59% of this holiday's engagement will come through ecommerce, and the other 45-40% will come through brick-and-mortar (based on actions to Listings). So, as above, make sure you update your website: are there landing pages you should create for special holiday events or sales? Are your FAQs and/or chat experiences ready to go if shoppers have questions? Festive in-store holiday displays are great, but make sure you deck the digital halls, too.

2. However, clothing stores are an outlier in retail: Clothing stores are the retail sub-vertical that will see the least amount of ecommerce traffic this holiday season as a percentage of total engagement (20-36%) — which means the majority of their traffic (80-64%) comes through the real-world front door. Make sure that your NAP (name, address, phone) data is up to date in advance of the busiest days you see in the dashboard, and it doesn't hurt to see if extra staff can be on hand. Finally, keep managing your listings through the holiday season so that your customers get the information they need.

We hope you'll find these quick stats helpful as you look to update your listings for key dates and prepare for surges in (digital and physical) traffic over the holidays. That said, the best way to confirm seasonality or other macro trends for various KPIs, see how your business stacks up against the vertical as a whole, or explore how your geography and subvertical compare to the trends of other geography-subvertical combinations is to check out the dashboard itself. (You can also check out last year's search trends report here.)

Click here to get started — and happy holidays.

*Trends based on Yext customer data, 2020-2023