Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday: Paid Search Spend and Clicks Surged
The online holiday shopping season is off to a blazing start, according to data from Performics. Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday saw paid search spend and clicks increase significantly year-over-year.
According to Performics, paid search spend rose 128 percent year-over-year on Thanksgiving Day, while clicks increased 87 percent.
On Black Friday, paid search spend rose 120 percent year-over-year, while clicks rose 65 percent.
Meanwhile, cost per click (CPC) rose 22 percent on Thanksgiving Day and 34 percent on Black Friday.
“While the effects of the recession are not over for retailers, we take the increased search activity as an indicator of pent-up demand for goods this holiday,” said Matt Miller, senior vice president of strategy and analytics for Performics. “However, the new post-recession shopper is researching online and on their mobile devices more than ever, to find the right combination of quality and price. Many of our clients this year took advantage of the early opportunity and increased their budgets accordingly to capture this demand.”
Dan Parks, associate director of strategy and analytics, went so far as to say: “We’ve never seen such clear evidence that searching for holiday shopping is happening earlier and earlier each year. Clicks are up significantly, and we saw a very significant increase in the percentage of clicks from mobile devices indicating true cross-channel shopping.”
Performics predicts that mobile paid search will account for 25.4 percent of all clicks (desktop and mobile) in December, up 8 percentage points from its projection last month.
In October, mobile accounted for 12.7 percent of all Google impressions and 15.3 percent of clicks. In November, these figures are pegged at 15.5 percent and 18.3 percent, respectively.
Smartphone CPCs remain at about 40 percent less than desktop CPCs, according to Performics.
Separate numbers from Compete show that “charlie brown toys,” “amazon toys,” “amazon” and “toys” were the top search terms leading to Amazon. Meanwhile, “toys r us,” “monster high dolls” and “orbeez soothing spa” were the top search terms leading to Toys ‘R’ Us. “Lego,” “barbie games,” “bey blades” and “leappad” were the top terms leading to Walmart.
In the first two weeks of November, ToysRUs.com received more than 22 million visits, up from 18.6 million visits during the same time period in 2010. However, searches for ToysRUs.com were down from the same time period last year.
“More shoppers may be navigating directly to the site this year, rather than finding the toys they need via search engines,” Lindsay Steinbach, associate in retail and consumer products at Compete, noted.
Sources:
http://blog.compete.com/2011/11/28/barbies-legos-and-tablets-top-toys-of-2011/
