Peak season is just around the corner and for many it has already started. Sophie Neary, managing director for retail and FMCG at Google explains how retailers can best prepare for the season.

The waiting lists for advent calendars are out, John Lewis have opened their online Christmas shop and many stores have started in getting in gift sets ready for the festive period.

Peak season starts earlier and earlier each year. Neary points out that it really tends to start around Amazon Prime Day in October.

Google also tends to see consumers viewing a lot of shopping related content on YouTube in October. Last year the general public watched 40 billion hours of shopping related content on YouTube globally, that is around 4.5 million years worth of unboxings, hauls, get ready with me’s and how to’s.

Neary explains: “The fact that that is starting in October means that retailers really need to be ready to capture all of that demand as it’s getting earlier and earlier. And the kind of the uncomfortable truth or the inconvenient message is if you’re kind of waiting till October, you’re potentially going to miss the party.

“We do a lot of work with retailers to help them understand category trends and insights to give them confidence to go into a really strong Golden Quarter season.

“And, all the changes that we’ve made to both search and YouTube mean that people are searching more than ever before. It is the most incredible opportunity for retailers to meet consumers as they are in that search moment.”

While it may be easy to thing consumers are getting fatigued by being bombarded with Christmas ads before Halloween is even over, Neary says that is far from the case.

The most searched Christmas related term in the UK on YouTube is Christmas ads. It is so popular YouTube even has a leaderboard, where brands can see who has the best performing Christmas ad. The platform also gives prizes out to the most viewed, most liked and most commented on ad.

Neary says: “Our Christmas ads leaderboard last year generated over 2 billion views of adverts on YouTube. It was just a mind-blowing number, and that’s across both YouTube short ads and longer form content.”

But even with all the love for Christmas ads in the UK, YouTube still has to balance advertising with customer service.

Neary explains that YouTube is first and foremost a content viewing platform. And unlike alot of other platforms its content is evergreen, you may see something and come back to it a month, two month later.

“However, what’s amazing for retailers or any advertisers is that they can seamlessly wrap their content around that viewer experience in a way that we know works, and I think one of the other things that I love about YouTube is the fact that consumers understand that creators earn revenue from the adverts that run alongside their content.

“We have done research that shows that people watching their favourite creators are actually favourably predisposed to having adverts because they know that their creators make money off the back of that, and that they are then able to use that money to keep making the content that the consumers love.”

One of the biggest pieces of advice we have for retailers is don’t shut shop early. Online shopping is available 24/7 and Google sees people searching and shopping all day every day. Around one billion people shop with Google across search and YouTube.

Its not just search that sees a lot of of traffic, Google Maps does too. The second reason people use Google Maps after get me from A-to-B is to find a shop near them.

Nearly explains that it speaks to retailers about how to capture every single sale: “We talk a lot to retail about how they follow the ebb and flow of consumer demand, so that when lots of people are leaning in and searching and looking for products, they can be there to meet them at the moment.”

When Neary worked for Boots, in what she terms the olden days of search, companies had a fixed budget for its search campaigns. However, if there was a huge rush then companies may just run out of stock. So the sale goes to the nearest competitor who has stock.

Neary highlights that the thing she loves most about Google Search is that businesses are able to tell it the ROI they want to hit and it will deliver it it. “The AI takes the guess work out of it.”

And consumer experience remains at the heart of YouTube as a platform as it is the “most important thing” to it.

“One of the things that’s exciting for this year is around the fact that YouTube isn’t just where people see your brand, but it’s where they decide to buy it. And if last year was the year that we used AI to reinvent how the world searches, this is the year that we are using YouTube to reinvent how we shop. So we’re making every surface shoppable.

You can have a shoppable shorts advert. You can have a shoppable long form advert. You can have a shoppable connected TV advert, and we also have the YouTube masthead, which is the equivalent of  Piccadilly Circus and this amazing homepage takeover, and that’s shoppable too.”

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