Google UK Retail Summit pt 1 – Philipp Schindler, VP for Northern & Central Europe, Google

Yesterday I attended Google’s UK Retail Summit at the very swish Andaz Hotel on Liverpool Street, London. The event was compered by Peter Fitzgerald, Industry Leader for Retail at Google UK and it was jam-packed with some of the biggest retailers and advertising agencies in the industry.

Phillipp Schindler (Google’s VP for Northern and Central Europe) was first up and opened the event with some hard-hitting stats about the latest trends of consumer behaviour in Europe:

• Google receives a staggering 3.6bn searches worldwide per day

• 64% of UK adults have used the internet to research products in the last 4 months

• 70% of UK web users will make at least one purchase online this year

• £42bn was spent online in July 2009 in the UK alone. This is up 70% year on year.

• £102m was spent online on Christmas Day in the UK in 2008 – but Boxing Day was bigger

Phillipp also gave the retailers in the room some practical tips on how to improve their own ecommerce operations:

• By simplifying the checkout form Comet increased conversion by 7%

• Next implemented Google’s technology for its internal site search and reduced exit rate by 19%

• The loading speed of the website is a key metric which affects revenue, and this is often overlooked

• Personalising the shopping experience will dramatically increase conversion

• Mobile is finally happening. 1.8bn apps downloaded from itunes shows that there is real worth in trying to move your ecommerce operation on to all available platforms.

• How mobile integrates with the high street will be one of the most interesting aspects of ecommerce in the next 5 years.

Also, Google dropped the statistic that the world’s second most popular search engine (behind Google) is YouTube.