Ready-to-Eat Cereal Most Clipped E-Coupon
The most popular coupons printed last month were for ready-to-eat cereal.
Yogurt and salty snacks rounded out the top three based on the number of coupon prints by category, according to Coupons.com, a network for digital coupons.
The ready-to-eat cereal category also held the top stop in January. Yogurt rose to No.2 from No. 4 and salty snacks made a big jump from No. 7 to No. 3. Sweet snacks took a nosedive, falling off the February list, after ranking No.9 in January.
The dollar savings of coupons printed climbed sharply to $39 million in February 2009, or 120% from $21 million in February 2008, the consumer Web site found.
Rounding out the top coupon categories are: personal care (No. 4), portable snacks (No. 5), baking ingredients (No. 6), frozen vegetables (No. 7), nutritional/diet (No. 8), carbonated soft drinks (No. 9) and bathroom tissue (No. 10).
People living in the South Atlantic region printed the most coupons last month, followed by the other top regions: East North Central, Mid-Atlantic, West South Central, Pacific, West North Central, Mountain, East South Central and New England, respectively.
The use of digital coupons has grown nationwide. More than 40 million people are printing online coupons, up 20% from last year, according to Simmons Market Research Bureau. In the same time period, the number of people that only print coupons from the Internet and never use newspaper coupons has risen a dramatic 46% to 6 million.
According to Nielsen, Coupons.com is the No. 1 online coupon and reward destination ranked by unique audience for February, followed by www.Eversave.com and www.RetailMeNot.com.
Coupons.com said that it reaches more than 75 million consumers through thousands of Web sites.
“As more and more households are looking to eat at home to reduce their budgets and looking to save money on those home-cooked meals, we are seeing record increases in traffic, new users and coupon prints,” “Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons, Inc., said in a release. “Consumers clearly appreciate the always available convenience of online coupons and are going online more frequently to print the coupons that are added daily.”
Coupons, Inc. clients and licensees include the majority of top consumer packaged goods companies such as Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, McDonalds and Clorox as well as hundreds of grocery retailers including Kroger, Safeway, CVS and Kmart.
Also driving the jump in online clippers is the increased number of media reports about online coupon clipping that explain how these Web sites work and what the most popular sites are as broadcast networks and others help to educate consumers about ways to save money in a weak economy.
