Performics Performance Marketing Blog: SEM, SEO, Social & Display

Black Friday Online Sales Wrap-Up

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

‘Tis the season for record-breaking Black Friday online retail sales.  According to comScore, U.S. shoppers spent $816 million online on Black Friday, a 26% increase over 2010.  Approximately 50 million shoppers visited online retail sites on Friday, a 35% increase over last year.  Additionally, shoppers ramped up their Thanksgiving Day online shopping, spending $479 million—an increase of 18% over Thanksgiving Day 2010.  November online spending up to Black Friday hit $12.7 billion, a 15% increase over November 2010 (comScore).

Black Friday, By the Numbers

Macro-trends

• Shoppers spent 3% more per order on Black Friday 2011 vs. 2010 (NPD Group)
• Interestingly, NPD reported that about 44% of Black Friday purchases were self purchases, up from 33% last year.  This indicates that people still have a lot of gifts to buy this holiday.
• The average male spent $201.62 online vs. $101.93 for the average female (NRF)
• The top 3 product categories were (1) clothing, (2) electronics and (3) toys.  Electronics in particular surged this year (23% of Black Friday shoppers bought electronics vs. 8% last year) (NPD).
• The most-visited sites were (1) Amazon, (2) Wal-Mart, (3) Best Buy, (4) Target and (5) Apple (comScore)

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Schema.org & the Importance of Microformats

Posted by Paul Williams, Sr. Specialist, SEO

There’s a lot of talk in content marketing circles about “atomizing” your content – that is, breaking it up and making it accessible in small chunks to appropriate syndication partners, media, and communication channels (e.g. social media, apps, blogs, etc.). Your content is the most important representation of your product and service types on the Internet, so it makes sense to try and spread it around to as many places as possible, right? Most of the time, however, content strategists reference a conscious and manual effort to chop up content and push it out. What if there was a way to truly atomize your content and make it machine-readable by any partner or application, down to the tiny bits of content like longitude and latitude, hours of operation, inventory, movie times and other things that are often buried in databases or dumped into text blocks on your site?

Thanksgiving & Black Friday Paid Search Performance: Spend & Clicks Rise Significantly

Performics' analysts have been crunching Black Friday numbers and findings include:

• Thanksgiving Day saw the biggest increases in activity: paid search spend up 128% and clicks up 87% year-over-year
• Black Friday saw paid search spend up 120% and clicks up 65% YoY
• CPCs steadily increased throughout the week, rising 34% YoY on Black Friday
• Mobile was over 20% of Google paid search clicks on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday. Performics predicts that mobile paid search will make up 25.4% of all clicks (desktop + mobile) in December 2011.

Matt Miller, SVP of Strategy & Analytics noted, "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. 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."

Mobile Paid Search Share to Skyrocket in December; Remains a Significant Bargain

Posted by James Beveridge, Sr. Analyst

Performics has updated its mobile benchmarks in anticipation of the holiday weekend and upcoming major shopping events.  We’re happy to deliver some strong early holiday news—mobile’s share of search impressions and clicks took an unseasonal leap over the past few weeks, and as a result we’re revising our holiday mobile forecast.  We now predict that mobile paid search will make up 25.4% of all clicks (desktop + mobile) in December 2011, up 8 percentage points from our projection a month ago. 

As Performics’ holiday retail benchmarking has suggested, “many [advertisers] are dedicating significantly more budget to paid search leading up to Black Friday 2011.”  Mobile search represents an opportunity to further increase share of voice, with increasing mobile search traffic offering significantly lower costs per click (CPC) when comparing smartphones to desktop computers.

Mobile Impressions & Clicks

In October, mobile was 12.7% of all Google impressions (desktop + mobile) and 15.3% of all clicks (excluding content and search partners).  In December, we expect mobile to be 20.1% of all impressions and 25.4% of all clicks.  This projection is up from our previous forecast due to a significant increase in paid search spend across our clients leading up to the holiday with an over-indexed investment in mobile.

Holiday Paid Search Spend Up 79% YoY; CPCs Stabilize

Posted by Ryan Hornacek, Analyst

For the last 7 weeks, we’ve seen major year-over-year paid search spend increases for our aggregate group of retailer clients.  Leading up to Black Friday, we saw an 82% YoY spend increase during the week of 11/6–11/12 and a 79% YoY spend increase during the week of 11/13–11/19.  More competition inflated CPCs, especially during the week of 11/6–11/12 (where CPCs were up 26% as compared to the same week last year).  But this week (11/13–11/19), CPCs started to stabilize (up 19% YoY).  This means that retailers aren’t just paying more this year for the same amount of clicks they got last year; they’re receiving significantly more clicks for their increased investment.  In fact, clicks were up 50% YoY during the week of 11/13–11/19. 

Early Industry Reports Forecast Strong Online Holiday

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

According to the Department of Commerce, U.S. retail sales rose .05% in October.  Many retailers are optimistic entering Black Friday and Cyber Monday, including Performics’ retailer clients (who have been increasing paid search spend over the last few weeks).  Other industry reports released also indicate that the 2011 holiday will be strong for retailers:

Last Minute Black Friday Trends & Tips

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

Black Friday is finally here!  Here are a few last minute trends and tips to get you ready for the big shopping weekend:

Trends

• 44% of participants plan to use social media sites when holiday shopping this year.  (Deloitte).  Many retailers are running Facebook campaigns to engage shoppers and promote deals.  (Internet Retailer).  In fact, 74% of retailers plan to use their Facebook pages to engage shoppers this Black Friday; up from 57% last year.  (BIG Research).  NRF reports that 17.3% of shoppers will monitor retailers’ Facebook pages on Black Friday, and 11.3% will check group-buying sites like Groupon and LivingSocial.
• 40% of e-commerce transactions included free shipping in Q3 2011 (comScore)
• Apps are big this holiday, including ShopSavvy, which allows shoppers to scan a product’s bar code to see if they’re getting the best deal, and Snaptell, which enables shoppers to snap pictures of products to see reviews and prices from various stores

A Social Holiday

Posted by Cristina Lucero, Research Associate

Many retailers are turning to social media to further engage participants this holiday.  This is because 44% of shoppers plan to use social media sites when shopping this year.  (Deloitte).  Social shopping includes seeking discounts, reading reviews and researching gift ideas.  In fact, 45% of people “Like” a brand primarily to receive discounts/special offers:

SEO Implications of Google’s “Freshness” Algorithm Change

Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Natural Search Specialist

Topic: Google algorithm change emphasizes content “freshness”
Challenge:  Achieving freshness visibility on the SERP
Channels: SEO

Google recently announced an algorithm change that could affect as many as 35% of its organic search results.  When a search query references recent events or breaking news—or when up-to-the-minute content is more useful than older content—Google will provide more visibility for sites with newly-updated content. 

For example, when someone queries “Yankees Score,” they’re telling Google they want information on the latest Yankees game.  Google’s algorithm is designed to address this—Google is more likely to prominently display recently-updated content at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). 

What This Means for Marketers

The magnitude of this algorithmic shift is quite large; Google’s “Panda” update affected only 12% of search results, while this change will impact 35%.  How will this affect sites—like those of retailers—that don’t have a lot of recent content?  Additionally, how should site content be formatted so freshness is apparent to Google?

Google outlined three types of affected search queries:

1. Trending/Recent Events Queries will be more likely to return content that’s only minutes old
2. Regularly Recurring Event Queries like TV shows, conferences, and games will return sites that reference the most recent instance of each event
3. Queries Referencing Frequently-Updated Content like product reviews will be more likely to return the latest reviews