Google have recently released their findings from a study into the length of time that customers are now spending researching an online purhase and have com up with some suprising results.

Not only are consumers starting their research earlier than ever before, there appears to be a growing number of people leaving their purchases to the very last moment.

In the run up to Christmas, their research showed that 44% had already started their decision making process 4 months before the big day. But also that 14% had not even started their shopping with only 5 days to go!

When I read it a couple of things crossed my mind:

1) how are we going to have to change our planning to start taking this into account and,

2) they left a whole 5 days to do their shopping! Now that’s planning ahead.

As you can probably tell I am a terrible Christmas shopper. A right last minute charlie.

Seriously though, as a marketeer we are going to have to learn to use the tools available to plan more effectively, not just in the run up to the holiday season, but also for any other key event in our marketing calendar such as mothers day, valentines, or even the 2012 Olympics?

In the world of search Google themselves provide a great insight tool (http://google.com/insights/search ) that can now even, for certain criteria, provide you with a forecast of search volume for key terms. Hitwise (www.hitwise.co.uk) can also offer you a great way to not only cluster some of your potential keywords into their own portfolio for monitoring their change over time but also to look at the top rising searches in your chosen industry or category.

For all media though let’s not forget the fundamental principle that we really need to understand what’s on our customers mind and then looking to trigger that awareness of your brands offering placing it in that consideration set they will then return to nearer the time of purchase. It’s a bit like a subliminal shortlist.

So I’ve now realised I’ve opened a bit of a can of worms, because we will want to track this longer term engagement cycle but that means setting a cookie length of anything up to 90 days! That’s one hell of a cookie, considering some retailers operate on a 7 day cookie. It’s time to contact our Analytics provider to have a little chat on attribution modelling for our campaigns I think.