The e-commerce flowers and gifts market faced a mixture of positives and challenges over the past year. Stay-at-home orders drove many consumers to send more flowers to loved ones whom they could not see in person during birthdays and holidays. On the same token, many florists experienced slower sales due to the loss of weddings and other major events, as well as staffing and supply chain challenges. All told, floral industry statistics in 2021 show that retailers netted out with stable results.
From an e-commerce advertising perspective, we took a closer look at the flowers and gifts segment in Sidecar’s 2021 Benchmarks Report. A couple key trends stand out.
Competition Shifts From Google Shopping to Paid Search
Google Shopping CPC for the flowers and gifts segment averaged $0.30 in 2020. That figure is 7% lower than CPC in 2019, and almost half that of the retail average ($0.56) in 2020. Meanwhile on Google paid search, CPC for the flowers and gifts segment ticked up by 9% year over year to $0.61 in 2020. It was nearly identical to the retail average of $0.62.
These changes could be due in part to retailers shifting some budget away from shopping ads and into paid search ads. As a result, we saw return on ad spend (ROAS) rise dramatically on Google Shopping — to the tune of 65%, reaching 7.79.
Paid Search Conversion Rate Rises
Conversion rate on paid search was another major area of change for flowers and gifts retailers, improving by 33% to 7.97% in 2020. That’s one of the strongest paid search conversion rates we saw across the 16 retail segments we studied.
One driving factor? Paid search ads provide multiple ways to attract shoppers, such as through custom ad copy and sitelinks, which support uplift in conversion. For instance, consider how you could use sitelinks to promote color palettes and textures, rather than a specific flower variety. This can be especially important if you’re facing any issues surrounding supply of certain flowers, as consumers play catch-up on wedding and event plans moving forward.
In addition, it’s important to consider new ways to run Google’s shopping and paid search ads more cohesively. We continue to see performance growth among retailers who manage these ads under the same team, because that team can control and guide the role that each channel plays in the overall marketing funnel.
Floral Industry Statistics 2021: More Insights
Want to keep reading? We published several other data sets for flowers and gifts retailers in Sidecar’s 2021 Benchmarks Report. Find year-over-year growth in all the KPIs covered here and comparisons to retail averages.
