In a data review demonstrating that “Cyber Monday” isn’t necessarily D-Day for online retailers anxiously watching holiday sales numbers, Performics, the performance marketing-based unit of DoubleClick, says its data show that “Cyber Monday” – the Monday after Thanksgiving that has generally been viewed as the busiest online shopping day of the season -- is actually just the first of four peak Mondays through the holiday season.
And a second online holiday shopping study released by digital marketing technologies provider Atlas, a unit of aQuantive Inc., shows that both Mondays and Tuesdays are the busiest online shopping days of the holiday season, showing 25% greater activity than during the rest of the week.
According to Performics’ data on online shopping from 2003 through last year, Mondays in general tend to be the busiest online shopping days during the peak retail season, with the second and third weeks seeing the most online activity. Cyber Mondays indexed at 11% per sales than other holiday shopping days in 2003, growing by last year to a high of 19% more sales than on other days.
Keywords, copy and keyword bid prices should be adjusted to reflect those peaks, notes Performics. Online marketers also can maximize online ad spending during the season with measures such as maintaining visibility on generic keywords and phrases to pull in shoppers who are early in the search process, and maintaining a position on “brand + location” and “product + location” keyword phrases to connect online with local shoppers.
The Atlas study forecasts that the busiest online shopping day this year will be Tuesday, Dec. 12, but also reports that consumer holiday shopping behavior varies greatly by verticals including retail, travel, insurance, finance, wireless and dating. “The day after Thanksgiving is no longer the single defining moment for marketers,” says John Chandler-Pepelnjak, principal analyst for Atlas and study report author.
Atlas analyzed online shopping and transaction data from November 21, 2005, to January 31, 2006, representing more than a quarter of a trillion impressions and hundreds of millions of transactions across 115 companies including 24 retailers. Other findings in those data offer a glimpse of more that retailers can expect online this season. For example, Atlas found that consumers are increasingly willing to push the shipping envelope, with consumer transactions spiking through the work week before Christmas. In fact, Atlas found 40% more online shopping activity the week before Christmas 2005 than in the previous year.
The Atlas study also determined that in the retail vertical, marketers can decrease their online advertising spending entering the week before Christmas. It also found that most clicks occur during the workday and work week, and advises marketers to bid more for keywords during those peak times while carefully monitoring results to insure that increased click volume is worth the cost.
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