Ramadan Season: Get the Data that Puts You Ahead of the Competition

Ramadan is when people come together to share the joy with their loved ones whether virtually or socially distanced this year. This study provides you insights from Similarweb’s Digital Marketing Intelligence that helps plan your marketing strategy for the upcoming Ramadan season. With COVID-19 pandemic today, we also took a look at how consumer preferences and spending changed.

According to a recent report published by McKinsey & Company, consumer behavior has shifted in five main areas:

• Increased online buying
• Increased interest in household goods
• Higher focus on essentials (health, hygiene, security and sustainability)
•  More mindful shopping (consumers do more research and look for cheaper alternatives and value)
• More readiness to break loyalty to a brand

Consumer loyalty has suffered during the time of crisis. This can be meaningful for retention marketing and also serve as an opportunity for your acquisition marketing and content strategy. Competition is certainly going to be fiercer than ever during this Ramadan season.

Understand Ramadan season traffic trends

This report highlights E-Commerce sites – Lazada.com.my, Shopee.com.my, Taobao.com, Amazon.com, AliExpress.com, Tmall.com, Tesco.com.my, Ebay.com, Alibaba.com, and Pgmall.my in Malaysia during:

• 2018: Pre-Ramadan (Apr 18 – May 15), Month of Ramadan (May 16 – Jun 14), EID & Post-EID (Jun 15 – Jun 28)
• 2019: Pre-Ramadan (Apr 7 – May 4), Month of Ramadan (May 5 – Jun 4), EID & Post-EID (Jun 5 – Jun 19)
• 2020: Pre-Ramadan (Mar 26 – Apr 22), Month of Ramadan (Apr 23 – May 23), EID & Post-EID (May 24 – Jun 6)

Ramadan is usually a high purchase season. With the impact of COVID-19 in 2020, these E-Commerce sites experienced a significant traffic growth by more than 32% pre-Ramadan and more than 39% in the month of Ramadan.

Lazada.com.my and Shopee.com.my dominated Malaysia’s E-commerce web traffic share over Ramadan season with more than 70% shares since 2018. In 2020, Taobao.com, Tmall.com and Pgmall.my expanded their online shares too.

Despite the increase in engaged site visits, these E-Commerce apps (Lazada, Shopee, Taobao, Amazon, AliExpress, Tesco, eBay, Alibaba, PG Mall) experienced YoY growth in the number of downloads over Ramadan season.

Total Daily Active Users (DAUs) also experienced YoY growth especially the local E-Commerce apps e.g. Lazada, Shopee, Tesco and PG Mall.

With households hunkered down at home, it looks like last year’s trend continues. For marketers, it means now is the time to buckle up; you might need an extra-aggressive Ramadan marketing strategy.

Optimize for strong SEO and PPC keywords

It is a good time to review your keyword strategies for Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) and Pay Per Click(PPC). After all, they are both major traffic drivers.

SEO means optimizing your website’s content, structure and user experience according to Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This starts with effective keyword research for organic searches and competitor analysis, followed by a review of your pages, and optimization of your pages according to your research findings. For SEO, it is crucial that your pages stay focused on the topic at hand which means your meta tags need to be relevant and your pages need to include related and relevant information around the right focus keyword. Another important factor is that your content needs to be linked to other pages on your site as well as from other websites. As your content pages gain authority and rank over time, they will move up the SERP.

The process of optimizing your pages should have started months ago, now is an excellent time to re-check your internal linking, meta titles, and image ALT tags and ensure everything is in the right place. It is also critical to check search volume changes and new trending keywords to make sure you are still targeting the best keywords. Searches are constantly changing so there might be new keyword phrases growing in search volume that your competitors are not targeting yet. The closer we get to Ramadan, the more competition gets fierce over major seasonal terms.

Keyword analysis for PPC is one of those critical tasks for the Ramadan season. To get optimal results with PPC, you have to be on the ball with the latest trending keywords. This is the time to finalize your budget, and adjust your bids and overall strategy, so you can easily adapt and pivot during the busier times ahead as you see campaign results and understand how your audience is responding. You may also want to adjust based on what your competitors are doing to drive clicks.

Analyzing keyword-driven traffic for seasonal marketing

During Ramadan, brands largely dictate what shoppers are searching for. That is because consumers do not want to miss out on their uncounted deals and special offers. For you, this is an opportunity to hook onto the right keywords and go head-to-head with your biggest competitors. It is a once-in-the-year chance to “steal” large amounts of traffic from under their nose and convert them into paying visitors. Once you have acquired new customers, it is hard for others to win them back.

You can use tools to receive the freshest keyword-related data and identify trends before anyone else. You can also generate and prioritize keywords, optimize traffic share, and benchmark against your industry. For example:

Next, we want to see if brands also snatch the majority of the traffic.

Ramadan 2020

A review of popular keywords in Ramadan 2020 shows that 4 out of the top 10 non-branded paid search keywords were related gadgets and home appliances.

Realme, Xiaomi and Sony appeared as the top searched brands and it is fair to assume that they appeared on wish list in shopping.

It is also interesting to see that ‘mr diy’ and ‘kaison’ appeared to be the top searched paid terms. Both Mr DIY and Shopee were actively capturing this shopping intended for household and electrical products for home improvements in preparation for Ramadan & EID.

Unlike PPC, most of the organic searched terms to the E-Commerce sites related to gaming(e.g. ‘nintendo switch’, ‘twitch prime’, ‘gaming chair’ and ‘razer’), health essentials(e.g. ‘face mask’) and home improvement(e.g. ‘mr diy’ and ‘daiso’). This demand was mostly due to the impact of working from home during Covid-19.

Build strong display and referral partnerships

Referral sites and a Display Ads strategy are crucial during the Ramadan season too. Why? Consumers are looking for deals, but they also know that not every ‘deal’ is a good bargain for them. They trust 3rd party sites to review and guide them through the jungle of deals during the shopping season.

Some of the affiliate and display publisher sites driving the most traffic fell within the 10 top winners of keyword traffic over the Ramadan season in 2020.

Here is your opportunity to generate more traffic to your site. Using referral sites such as deal comparison sites and review sites can help you win a bigger chunk of the traffic share.

Find your best affiliates by analyzing the performance statistics of display publishers and referral sites. You can compare relevant sites and identify the biggest traffic providers. This enables you to benchmark against your main competitors for traffic from significant sites.

The Ramadan marketing games are on, roll up your sleeves!

During the Ramadan season, optimizing your digital strategies is more critical. You can only be sure of its efficiency when you build on reliable data about you and your main competitors’ performance.

Understand how different channels work together to drive success. Leverage seasonal market trends and determine how to make consumer behavior work in your favor. Find the best affiliates to partner with, the most successful channels to utilize, and the highest trending keywords in real time. If you cannot wait to see how you can fine-tune your marketing strategy for this Ramadan season, connect to us for the most up-to-date data for this year and get the competitive edge you need to blow your competition away.

by Similarweb