Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!
As our Valentine’s Day gift to you, we offer this bouquet of Power BI visualizations, filled with the most carefully selected data and freshest insights related to this most romantic of holidays. These dashboards are fully interactive so play around them!
Our data sources for these visualizations are the NRF 2014 report on Valentine’s Day spending for Americans and Bing search data for Valentine’s Day terms. We used the NRF report to create dashboards based on average spending by relationship, type of gift, and gender. Then, we analyzed keyword traffic in Bing to find some interesting results.
Let’s dive in and see what the numbers have to say.
When it comes to relationships, the biggest spenders, by far, are partners. Average gift spending for the Partner category is $78.1. No surprise there! The average spending of partners has gone up for the last three years, increasing 5.4 percent since 2012. Family is second, at $23.4, and Friends third with $7.1 in average spending. When it comes to geography, the South seems to be the most romantic, leading in Valentine’s spending with $20.5 for all types of relationships.
Now that we know who’s doing the buying, let’s look at what they’re buying. What gifts are the most popular? The two main spending categories are Jewelry and An evening out. The average cost of items in these categories is usually higher than any other type of gift. The always popular Flowers option comes in third.
Finally, let’s take a look at average spending by gender. Men take the lead, nearly doubling women in Valentine’s spending—$24.7 vs. $13.8. The top three types of gift from men are—you guessed it—jewelry, an evening out, and flowers.
Let’s turn our attention to search, focusing on the top five daily keyword searches related to Valentine’s Day, between December 21st and February 7th. Search activity, as you can see, increases as you get closer to Valentine’s Day, staying very low until mid-January and surging by late January.
The biggest chunk of search volume goes to “valentine day gifts”. The biggest question on the average American mind was: What type of gift should I get for my valentine? Take a closer look at February 3rd—something very interesting happened. The search term “valentine gift ideas” surged only on that day, yet didn’t show up in the ranking during the rest of the period. It appears that 11 days before Valentine’s Day people started running out of ideas and turned to Bing for help.
Check out the numbers yourself. We made this file available for download, so you can explore and interact with these dashboards and get your own insights!