A new quarterly report to measure growth in online retail traffic has been announced today by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) and search engine Google.

Speaking at the BRC’s Multi-Channel Retail Conference today, Google’s senior industry retail head John Gillan said the BRC-Google Online Retail Monitor (ORM) will measure traffic – the equivalent of footfall for store retailing - for the part of the retail sector that operates online.

It will report changes and trends in numbers of unique visitors to retail websites, comparing the performance of online-only retailers with multi-channel retailers (those using stores and the internet).

Online activity will also be broken down geographically and the growth of smartphone retail traffic will be measured. A ranking of the most popular retail search terms will show current consumer trends.

“The launch of the Online Retail Monitor marks a huge step in achieving multi-channel measurability for the online retail sector,” said Mr Gillan.

“The tool will be able to quantify the growing traffic to the fast-changing retail industry, as well as establish key trends and determine retail hot spots for online traffic. As the most advanced e-commerce country in the world, the ORM can further drive the UK retail economy.”

Online is, by far, the fastest growing part of UK retailing but online retail data has not been issued in this way before, the BRC pointed out.

The first ORM will be published in mid-April and will complement figures for online spending that are published monthly as part of the BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor.