Shopping.com Demographics

It’s important to know your customer.

Understatement of the year? Perhaps. However, it’s a legitimately good statement that most advertising platform users are not very aware of what the average consumer looks like on a given platform. Recently, Shopping.com was kind enough to issue some information about their users. Great data, and worth taking a look at:

• Young: Median age is 45
• Affluent: Median income is $70K+
• Educated: 61% are college grad/post grad educated
• Balanced: a 60/40 split of females (60) and males (40)
• Active buyers: 70% bought online in the last 30 days

For age, if you are familiar with Harry S. Dent’s research (if not, check it out), then you know age is extremely important when calculating what a person will spend. The median age for Shopping.com is an excellent indicator that the average person on this site is old enough to make a decent amount of money, and young enough to have things and people to spend that money on instead of conserving for retirement. The median income is also tied into the concept that users on Shopping.com have the resources to do something with the income online since they are likely have disposable amounts of that income to use. The amount of educated users is interesting as well. It would make sense that if a person has spent the time and effort to complete school, they may be inclined to perform a good amount of research before a purchase is made. It’s an interesting theory, but it’s more likely correlated to the income distribution. That is, if you have money, it’s probably because you are educated.

The gender equity is important. Some sites like SHOP.COM slant heavily female, while Shopping.com has more of an even split. Important depending the product selection being advertised, and this case balanced enough reach both Full Moon and football enthusiasts.

In my opinion, the best part of the data is the online shopping bit, where 70% have purchased in the past 30 days. Since there are still people who have not purchased online, and more importantly, people who may not have purchased recently, this is wonderful indicator showing that on average the majority of people viewing a Shopping.com advertisement, are those viewers ready and willing to pull the trigger.

Since I don’t have data like this available on other shopping engines, I will be following up with a post on breaking down the demographics or other engines using Google/Double Click’s Ad Planner as a reference. As a merchant, if you can’t see each individual out there, it’s good at least to know what the crowd looks like.

April 7th, 2010