Online retailers are reporting greater growth in search traffic on the Mondays between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year in comparison to the same period last year.
Shopping.com’s traffic to its merchants on Cyber Monday 2007 increased 28% compared to last year, according to eBay Inc., which owns the comparison shopping site. On December 11, the site reported that traffic to its merchant partners on the second Monday in December increased 54% since last year.
According to data from PayPal, which is also owned by eBay, the second Monday in December has been the busiest online shopping day of the year for the company since 2001.
On December 5, Netconcepts, a Web design and consulting company, reported that retailers are experiencing higher growth rates of natural or unpaid search traffic, particularly from Monday to Monday, this holiday season.
The study tracked data collected from GravityStream, which is owned by Netconcepts. Companies using GravityStream reported a 28% increase in natural search engine traffic from November 19 to November 26, according to Netconcepts. Last year, this same interval only generated an 18% growth, the company said.
December 17 is expected to be the biggest Monday of all in terms of search activities and the volume of searches, according to Brian Klais, VP of search for Netconcepts. It is anticipated that searcher activity would go back to pre-holiday levels on Christmas Eve, he said.
So far, this holiday season, natural search traffic has continued to grow from one Monday to the next, Klais added. For example, there was higher search traffic on December 3 than there was on November 26, he said.
On average, Netconcepts discovered an average of 14.5% week-to-week growth so far this year, compared to 9% during the same time period in 2006.
In addition to search activity, the Mondays during the holiday season are expected to be big e-mail marketing days.
This year, 68% of the largest online retailers sent at least one promotional e-mail on Cyber Monday, making it the biggest e-mail marketing day of the year to date, up from 44% last year, according to RetailEmail.Blogspot, a Web site that tracks e-mail marketing campaigns of major retailers. This year, the company expects that even more retail e-mails will be sent on the Mondays leading up to Christmas, as well as the day after Christmas, which is a Wednesday.
