Commercials Drive Searches

Since the 2009 Super Bowl, I’ve monitored how the ads influence search interest, and every year, the trend has been the same. As people watch the Super Bowl, they search for everything they’re watching: teams, players, performers, and of course, commercials. The trend continues the day after the game as people talk about the commercials and turn to Google (and Bing) to watch them again. Take a look at the spiking searches for February 7th, the day after the game according to Google Trends:

Nearly every search is Super Bowl related, and searchers are clearly seeking out the ads. As you can see from search #8, commercials often cause people to search for the brands directly. Google Insights for Search shows that brands that advertised saw significant search spikes on Sunday. See for instance, the search volume for [bud light platinum].

They seemed to have really liked those ads in Iowa.

Google reported that searches for [super bowl ads] were 122 times higher this week and that the big search winners were Acura, GoDaddy, and M&Ms.

Where Are Advertisers Sending Potential Customers?

As I do every year, I took note of what advertisers included in the commercial. Did they include a web site URL? A Facebook page? Did they seem to even be aware of this crazy new thing called the internet? And then I looked at the advertisers’ search visibility. I was looking for the following flow:

Last year, many only paid attention to a flow like this:

I understand that Super Bowl commercials are about branding, not necessarily instant purchases, and I realize other positive outcomes exist (discussions on social media and the like). I’m just saying that if someone is searching for you, you may as well show up. And if you’ve gotten potential customers to view your commercial, you may as well make it easy for them to view more information about your products.

This year, many advertisers simply included their domain name in the ad (33 of the 53 advertisers I tracked did this). This approach can help cut out the search step, although as the response to the Dockers ad during the 2010 Super Bowl showed, advertising a URL causes people to, well, search for the URL. So you can’t always cut out the search step, no matter how hard you try.

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were all about Facebook fan pages (that often were impossible to find; don’t say “find us on Facebook” unless that’s an achievable task). This year, only fourof the ads included a nod to Facebook and all used actual URLs. Pepsi Max even went with an easy to remember redirect to Facebook: pepsimax.com/facebook.

Four commercials advertised Twitter hashtags (last year was the first year for this, and then it was mostly only for movie trailers). I was astonished to find that when a hashtag was included in a commercial, people instantly started using it to tweet about the commercial and the hashtag began trending. (As you can see, even the bands with songs in the commercials started trending.)

Of course, there’s a risk in this strategy. Things may go really well, as Audi found with #SoLongVampires, or very awry as Bud Light found with #MAKEITPLATINUM. (Did people really even use the same capitalization in the hashtag as was used in the commercial? Amazing.)

What began trending on Twitter also tended to show search spikes. For instance, take a look at searches for [echo and the bunnymen]:

So what we talk about, we also search for.

The Future is… QR Codes?

It may have seemed like GoDaddy used the same tired formula as always in their ads (although, apparently sex does sell, so I can’t knock sticking with something that works), but in fact, they tried something new this year: including a QR code in the ad.

The online version of the commercial includes the QR during the entire length of the ad, but when aired during the Super Bowl, it appeared only briefly at the end, so I’m not sure if  anyone managed to pull up the QR code reader on their mobile phone, rush to the TV, and scan it before it disappeared from the screen. Including it in the online version seems even more nonsensical though, as the idea seems to be that you’re watching the ad on your computer, see the QR code, scan it with your phone, and are brought to the godaddy.com site on your phone. I would guess that including a link to the web site in the commercial so that you can simply click and access the web site on your computer would make entering your credit card information for all those domain names quite a bit easier.

Scoring Search Visibility

So how did advertisers do in search? It’s difficult to come up with exact search coverage percentages. For instance, if a brand advertised multiple products and ranked well in search results for one product but not the other does the tick mark for that brand go in the yes or no column for search visibility? What if the product showed up for its name but not for its tagline?

For the purposes of the stats below, I used the following guidelines:

• I counted each brand once, even if they aired ads for multiple products
• If they ranked organically for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the organic search column
• If they had a paid search ad for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the paid search column

In a follow up column, I’ll point out some interesting choices, but for now, let’s just look at how well advertisers thought out web sites, search, and social media.

Of the 53 brands I tracked:

• 33 ended the ad with a URL to the brand site, 4 went with a Twitter hashtag, and 4 sent viewers to Facebook.
• 44 bought a paid search ad
• 51 ranked organically for the brand name (although far fewer ranked for the promoted taglines or hashtags)

Chrysler and YouTube

Last year, Chrysler’s Eminem ad was one of the most popular commercials of the game. I found it odd at the time that although they designed their site’s home page to tie in quite well to the vibe of that ad, they bought search ads to the commercial on YouTube. I felt they lost an opportunity to further interact with potential customers and lost some control of the experience (related videos could easily be to competitors, for instance). Their flow looked like this:

That’s not a bad outcome, but I thought that if they had used paid search to drive visitors to the commercial on their site, they might have been able to better leveraged the opportunity. This year, Chrysler once again had a much-talked-about ad, and they decided to mix things up a bit.

For [chrysler]-related searches, the paid search ad points at their home page, which is a great tie in to the commercial. But for other searches, they’ve once again chosen to promote YouTube.

This time, the YouTube link makes a lot more sense as it’s to the channel, so there are no competitor links and the entire page is focused on getting votes for the YouTube AdBlitz, engaging socially, and even includes an ad for the car featured in the commercial. All in all, I fully support this approach. They keep the branded searches pointing at their home page (after all, not everyone searching for the brand is searching for the commercial), which is tightly-integrated with the campaign, and they send those looking for the commercial to a page designed to specifically engage with them.  What a difference a year makes.

2012 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

2011 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

Acura NSX vs. Bud Light Platinum

We’ve already seen that the #makeitplatinum hashtag strategy both worked and didn’t work for Bud Light (they definitely got it trending, but for perhaps the wrong reasons). What about organic search visibility? Sadly, the brand web site doesn’t appear at all in Google for searches for [bud light platinum] (although they have bought a paid search ad to the YouTube page).

Acura NSX, on the other hand (which was a spiking search on Monday), does an excellent job with organic search, taking the top spot with a page devoted to it. (Although including the commercial on the page would have been a good idea.)

Overall, I felt brands did a much better job of keeping things simple and driving viewers to interesting, relevant pages that engaged them. Watch for my next post in the coming days for some specifics on what went right and spectacularly wrong.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• Super Bowl 2011: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2010: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2009: Commercials and Search Visibility

There’s a great deal of data already in the market about SMB adoption of social media. What they show is that between 45 percent and 70 percent of SMBs say they already have a presence on social media sites (mostly Facebook).

Borrell reports that between 60 and 64 percent of SMBs have a formal presence on social media sites. An earlier 2011 study by Palore found that 58.2 percent of SMBs are on either Facebook or Twitter. And a late-November survey from MerchantCircle found that about 70 percent of SMBs said they promoted themselves using Facebook.

Borrell also found that social media marketing was just behind paid-search for SMBs in 2011. Given the ambivalence that many SMBs feel about paid search (though not organic) one could expect that social media advertising and other promotional spending would surpass paid search in 2012.

Borrell’s report estimates that roughly $6.2 billion was spent in 2011 on social media advertising (all in) and that Facebook captured or saw about 65 percent of that. The SMB-specific component of social media spending is smaller, roughly $1.14 billion, according to the report.

Another interesting piece of data in the report is the way that SMBs measure social media success or ROI. Most use “new customers” as the key metric (it’s not clear how many actively or successfully track that however). Additional fans/followers comes in at number two.

Borrell says, “On average each [SMB] has a network of more than 4,000 friends and followers. But this statistic is skewed by a few respondents who claim tens of thousands or more. Perhaps a better gauge is the median reported: about 250 followers.”

Yet even 250 fans/followers is probably more than a substantial percentage of SMBs have on their pages. The mid-2011 Palore study argued that about 38 percent of SMBs on Facebook had very few fans/Likes and very little engagement. The percentage of SMBs showing limited follower activity was even larger on Twitter (44.5 percent).

The Borrell report illustrates the increasing demand for social media marketing among SMBs. However it doesn’t explore the gap between that demand and the often ineffectual or inept social media efforts of those same businesses.

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In life, timing can be everything. But in marketing, it can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. That’s why the topic of recency is so important to marketers. Fortunately, search retargeting can help marketers capitalize on recency to drive performance.

Understanding Recency & The Window Of Opportunity

The concept of recency has been a key element in marketing for decades. It speaks to customer engagement in relation to time. For example, a consumer who interacted with your brand two days ago is more engaged and has a better recency score than someone who did the same a year ago.

In short, recency informs marketers about the window of opportunity to reach a consumer. I think industry legend Erwin Ephron said it best:

“… there is a window of opportunity for the ad message preceding each purchase. Advertising’s job is to influence the purchase. Media’s job is to put the message in the window.”

The Problem With Search & The Window

For today’s marketers, putting the message in the window is about using digital media to reach prospective customers at the optimum moment, when intent is expressed and they are in the proper mindset to receive your message and purchase your product.

While this is exactly what search does, it only addresses a small fraction of the effective recency window.

Why?

First, while search engines offer consumers immediate results to their queries, some conversations — depending on the vertical — require more detail or time to resonate with consumers.

In other words, to properly hit the window, advertising may need to be both now and later.

Second, only some initial offers get through — fewer than 5% of search results are actually ever clicked.

What Search Retargeting Can Do for Your Window of Opportunity

Search retargeting extends the brand conversation with a consumer beyond the initial point of exposure or expression of intent. Because of that, it gives marketers a better chance of hitting their window of opportunity.

In fact, some search retargeting solutions enable marketers to retarget consumers with granular recency settings that span from instant all the way to a full month out. Capitalizing on recency within search retargeting allows marketers to fine tune their efforts in regard to both timing as well as messaging. Doing exactly that will help them boost campaign performance.

Marketers can also improve performance in search retargeting by understanding how recency (the time between the search event and when an impression is served) impacts their success metrics, whether those metrics are CTR, CPC, ROAS, or something else.

The impact of recency will vary with different verticals, as well as with different campaigns within the same vertical. Once data is collected on the impact of recency on a particular campaign, it can be used to fine-tune campaigns.

Whether you use manual optimization efforts or automated multi-variate optimization algorithms, your recency data will help inform you, so you can raise bids for impressions within the valuable recency windows and lower bids for impressions outside of these windows.

The Impact of Recency On Search Retargeting Campaigns

In a recent study, Simpli.fi analyzed aggregate performance data for search retargeting campaigns over a 30-day period. We examined click-thru rates segmented by recency: delivery of impressions from Instant (on the page after the search results), all the way to 30-days post initial search.

The results indicate that the highest impression loads were delivered between one day and one week of identified intent, while the highest CTR performance was clustered within earlier stages of exposure, 30 minutes or less. And while such aggregate data is interesting, the more powerful data speaks to how recency impacts individual campaigns.

For example, the study shows that the tech vertical tends to favor a shorter recency window than the clothing vertical, but within those verticals different types of keywords (eg, upper funnel vs lower funnel) can perform differently.

How To Make Recency Work for Your Retargeting Campaigns

Below are four tips to help you best capitalize on recency in your search retargeting campaigns, whether these adjustments are made manually or “automagically” by optimization algorithms:

1.  Start with long windows, refine to shorter windows

2.  Analyze recency by vertical and campaign

3.  Analyze recency by keyword type

4.  Adjust based on your goals

Overall, by leveraging recency with search retargeting, marketers have a better shot at hitting their window of opportunity and boosting their campaigns’ performance. Smart marketers will be sure to tap into recency with their search retargeting efforts.

But does this overlap really exist, and does 1+1 really equal 3, or does is it actually just equal 2?

In order to find out the answer, I recently asked several experienced figures within our industry for their insights and comment.

• AKQA Media – Drew Wahl, Director of Business Development
• Booyah Advertising – Emily Iverson, Director of Display Media
• ethology – Jeff Pruitt, CEO (and former President of SEMPO)
• iCrossing – Chris Wallace, SVP Media

Each of these people are knowledgeable in both types of media, and are actually involved in the oversight of plans or teams where both display planning and search engine marketing are occurring, and our thanks to them for taking part in this discussion, the conclusions from which are published below (the full, unedited responses can be viewed in their entirety here).

Each contributor was asked the same two questions:

1. Is there really an overlap between search and display that benefits campaigns, or is it just hypothetical?
2. If there is, what are those benefits and what advice would you give a search marketer to capitalize on them?

A Convenient Story

Early in my agency days, I remember adding a slide to my overview display deck that stated (in a big, bold font of course) that ‘1+1=3’ and would wax lyrical about how we had an integrated media offering. I stood by my slide, believing that marketing across SEM and display as isolated channels could not be the right approach. In my mind, each channel had a halo effect on the other and this surely must create additional value for the advertiser.

I would quote the usual studies that demonstrated this uplift in return of anything from 2.4x to 10x when adding a display buy to a search program, but true behavioral insight always seemed to be lacking in those studies. And so a question remained in my mind as to why and how this effect occurred, and what strategies were best at making it happen.

1+1 = Something More Than 2

All our contributors report seeing real benefit from running display and search programs together in ways that help explain the mythical halo effects we have seen for years, but also that reveal themselves with quantifiable measurements.

At ethology, Jeff reports seeing that individuals will search multiple times on multiple keywords before they make a decision. This consideration window is clearly prime time for a marketer; it is the “opportunity to expose [individuals] at different points during the research experience with very targeted display that result in a higher likelihood to take an action”.

With each individual performing more searches than ever before, this window is broad, creating a greater chance a competing brand could steal that customer for themselves. Display is a tool to combat this potential leakage.

The effect of this window is measurable too according to iCrossing’s Chris Wallace. They have seen situations where this repeated exposure has led to an increase in branded search queries that has “an efficient and meaningful impact on digital campaigns”, a logical outcome when we think about how during that research phase an individual will often start with a broad query (“chicago hotel”) before narrowing it down to a solution (“doubletree hotel Chicago rates”). And if that is the case, it means we can look beyond generalizations and start to quantify.

Whilst these points suggest that display is merely increasing the frequency of an event that was occurring anyway, AKQA Media have built a digital analytics platform that is seeing users across multiple channels and is showing cases where individuals are performing brand searches that would not have done so without first having the display exposure. Clearly these agencies are able to prove today that the benefits are real.

Universal Advice – Measurement Matters

In terms of advice from the experts of what you should do, the message is loud and clear – measurement is going to be critical to understanding the overlap, but it is also not going to be easy.  The ideal solution is an attribution model that can see all your marketing investments and sort through the results to understand how each one influenced every transaction.

In previous articles,we have discussed though how this is often not possible, and at the very least is cumbersome.

With a need to measure something though, you must cut through the clutter and find something that works for you, a process that involves understanding the difference between on site and off site interactions.

At Booyah Advertising, Emily’s team will look at standard metrics such as CTR and CPA but also carry out incremental lift studies with partners like Chango in order to examine the percentage of interaction from each channel that is incremental – this helps to get a read on the maximum potential impact one channel could be having on another.

Clearly this is a good starting point, and is probably the easiest for you to report on internally – “we launched display and saw a a 20% increase in our CTR in search” for instance.

These metrics are primarily occurring and being measured off site though, they are at the point of exposure to the campaign itself. Agencies iCrossing and AKQA both responded to the questions with points that demonstrate how the behavior of individuals changes for the better ON the client’s site if they are first exposed to both search and display campaigns.

This can be measured by looking at ‘engagement metrics’ from incoming traffic such as time on site, pages visited and a very interesting point from ethology, the time to convert.

Be Prepared

So now we know that the overlap exists, that it is quantifiable, and even where we should look for the signal of evidence, should you go out and add display to your search program immediately?

Chris thinks not, and instead would “advise marketers to consider a measurement strategy BEFORE campaign launch that will be used to evaluate search and display’s combined impact during the campaign – this method allows for adjustments to made before campaigns terminate and allows for improvements to had within the campaign flight period.”

This is sound advise, especially given that in order to be looking at the overlap you must make use of unique IDs that can be read across channels, something that requires technical investment and careful planning.

Conclusion

The result of the equation, 1+1, does indeed equal more than 2, and with careful thought and measurement, quantifiable metrics can be discovered that will help you understand the exact answer for your own campaigns – best if planned in advance.

Clients working with AKQA Media, Booyah Advertising, ethology and iCrossing are benefitting from working with experienced and integrated teams who know how to bring these things together, and advanced techniques like search retargeting capitalize on the best of both of these worlds, and are helping all 4 agencies take this integration a step further.

According to Jeff, “advertisers that don’t take the next step to build or obtain systems that allow the search advertisers to manage the two channels in a centralized technology that appropriately attributes the impact each channel has on performance and conversions, will not be fully maximizing their advertising spend and the resulting actions.”

Feel it’s a lot of work? As Emily plainly states, the overlap is real, and if you don’t believe it then “pause one of your campaigns (search or display) and measure the drop in your key performance indicators, see for yourself!”

Why is this so shocking? Placing search ads inline with organic free listings is somewhat taboo for search companies.

Years ago, search engines had “paid inclusion” programs which guaranteed content to be indexed, but they had no ranking factors. In fact, Yahoo after much controversy dropped their paid inclusion program in 2009.

But to allow advertisers to inject ads with guaranteed rankings in the organic results seems unethical to me.

Danny scolded Google for doing a form of this within Google Product Search.

If you look at the ads here, they are almost completely blended into the organic results that they look to be completely unbiased, free, organic listings. The “ad” label all the way on the right can be completely missed.

I have emailed Microsoft for a statement on this and to confirm this is a real test. I will follow up as soon as I hear back.

Postscript: Microsoft has confirmed this is a test they are running. A Microsoft spokesperson said:

We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.

Related Articles:

• Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program
• Ask.com’s CEO, Jim Lanzone, Calls Yahoo Paid Inclusion “Hypocritical”
• Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
• Drill, Baby, Drill: Google Finance Gets Ads; Google News Testing Them

Covario says Q1 spending was up 6% over the traditionally heavier Q4 period, and up 26% over Q1 of 2010. The huge year-over-year increase is mainly due to how weak spending was in Q1 2010.

Much of the growth is coming outside the US: Spending in both the Asia-Pacific and Europe-Middle East regions are up almost 50% over the past year. Consequently, Covario says, spending on Google is up 25% over the past year, spending on Yahoo is up 28%, and Bing — with its US focus — only saw a 4% increase in spending.

User Centric studied the search behavior of 24 “experienced users” of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. They were asked to do eight searches — four on Google (with Google Instant turned off) and the other four on Bing.

The results? Here’s a table version of the diagram above.

User Centric says there’s no significant statistical difference between the 28% of searchers who looked at Google’s right-side ads and the 21% who looked in the same place on Bing (as shown in row three above). Ads that appear above the organic results were viewed substantially more often than those in the right column and almost as often as the organic search results.

The various filters and refinements that both Google and Bing display on the left-side of the search results page were looked at even less than paid ads on the right: 18% for Bing and 17% for Google. Notably, time spent looking at Bing’s left column was more than twice on Google.

The main difference in activity was in time spent looking at organic search results; searchers on Google spent four more seconds looking there than Bing users did. The image example above is a search for “engagement ring” — both search engines provided a map with local results in the middle page along with numerous traditional “blue link” results. It looks like there may also be a news result near the top of the Google results. User Centric says one possible interpretation for the time difference is that users had more trouble finding the information they were looking for on Google, but it’s not clear what the reason was.

One other interesting stat: User Centric says only 25% of the study participants activated Bing’s automatic site previews, and each time it happened accidentally. Google also offers Instant Previews, but those require a click.

You can read more about the study on User Centric’s website.

In a high-volume world, actively managing negatives is possibly the single most impactful opportunity you have for increasing conversions and decreasing costs.

Keyword building is a continuous process for both positive and negative keywords. If you have not been regularly managing your negative list, chances are that you are getting some “bad impressions” on your paid search ads. Bad impressions are instances when your ad is served to a consumer whose search term is not going to lead to a valuable conversion for your business.

Negative Keywords In Action

Let’s use a sporting goods retailer as an example: assume a consumer searches for “road bike repair” and gets served an ad set on phrase match for the keyword “road bike.”  Since the consumer is looking for something the retailer doesn’t offer, even if they click on the ad they are highly unlikely to convert.

Using negative keywords to eliminate these bad impressions will help cut unnecessary cost and improve ROI, but the benefits of negatives go far beyond simple cost reduction.

Let’s look at an example of how adding negatives can deliver impressive results. PowPow Sports has a paid search campaign that is driving both good and bad impressions, each subset of which performs differently as described in the graphic below.

To eliminate these bad impressions, PowPow Sports used negative keywords to get rid of irrelevant and non-converting terms. Raw search query data is a great way to identify potential negative keywords that are driving bad impressions from broad and phrase match terms.

Review this report specifically for queries that are irrelevant to your business, and add these terms to your negative keyword list at the campaign or even account level to eliminate non-converting impressions.

Pruning your keyword list should have a significant impact on overall campaign performance. Going back to the PowPow Sports example, look at the table below to see the impact of eliminating the bad impressions from irrelevant keywords.

Because the click-through rate was low, and conversion rate was zero for the bad impressions, adding negatives significantly improved the overall financial performance of the campaign. PowPow sports is paying for less clicks but still generating the same number of conversions.

But that’s not all, eliminating irrelevant searches boosts the click-through rate, which typically increases quality scores. This improved quality ranking provides even more reduction in cost as well as improved ad position, driving more traffic and conversions.

Finally, the increase in conversion rates from existing terms allows you to bid more for keywords, reinvesting the money you have saved from bad impressions into high performing terms.

With higher bids comes higher average positions and increased revenue, while maintaining consistent spend levels. This virtuous cycle of lowering costs per click, while at the same time increasing quality and position, results in a win-win for the marketer: increased revenues and ROI.

Eliminating unwanted impressions and clicks from your paid search program is more than just a nice to have; it is becoming increasingly critical for your bottom line. Most optimization efforts require investment – raising bids to increase position, adding keywords to acquire more traffic, or even the opportunity cost of spending time testing creative.

Negative keywords, on the other hand, are an efficient way to decrease costs while increasing ROI and top line revenues. As you consider options for optimizing paid search, eliminating non-converting impressions with negative keywords should top out your list as one of the best investments money can’t buy.

The company says that the transition led to small drops in click share and spend share, and a larger drop in overall paid search ad impressions for Yahoo-Bing. But, the flip side of that was a gain in revenue-per-click (RPC).

Efficient Frontier says revenue-per-click on Yahoo-Bing used to be about 20% lower than on Google, but the two are even now (as shown above). As the chart shows, Yahoo-Bing have seen a moderate increase in RPC, while Google’s dropped in the 4th quarter.

The company also says advertisers on Yahoo-Bing saw better ROI than expected, and the combined platform is providing ROI that’s “about the same as Google now.” Because of that increase in ROI on Yahoo-Bing, cost-per-click there was essentially the same as Google by the end of 2010.

Kenshoo: Budgets, Transactions, Revenues Up

Kenshoo, a provider of digital marketing software that’s used by five of the top 10 US retailers, says search advertising boomed during the month leading up to, and including, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. In its first Online Holiday Shopping Report, Kenshoo says search ad budgets, transactions, and revenue were all up this year:

Overall, for the 26-day period ending with Cyber Monday, 2010 search advertising budgets were up 31% compared to 2009. Total online sales transactions increased 83% during this time, resulting in 60% more online sale revenue for retailers.

The company’s report compares 2009 and 2010 on a variety of search-related ad metrics. Here are pair of charts showing search ad click-thru rates and search ad sales revenue broken down over several timeframes.

Kenshoo’s report lists six trends uncovered from its data:

1. The Holiday Shopping Season is Starting Earlier

2. Online Shoppers are More Responsive to Paid Search Advertising
3. Consumers are Buying More Often With Smaller Basket Sizes
4. Paid Search Advertisers Have Increased Effectiveness
5. Thanksgiving is Now “Cyber Kickoff Day”
6. Competition for Retailers Peaks on Cyber Monday

SearchIgnite: Black Friday Beats Cyber Monday

SearchIgnite, a search advertising agency that manages more than $1 billion in ad spend for its clients, reports that Black Friday far outpaced Cyber Monday this year:

Consumers spent nearly 90% more compared to Black Friday 2009. In a positive sign that confidence is back, consumers also spent more per transaction this year, with a 24% increase in Average Order Values YoY. To heavily promote Black Friday deals, and to capture more consumer dollars in the competitive retail environment, U.S. retailers increased their spend on paid search advertising 47% YoY.

SearchIgnite says Black Friday advertisers saw year-over-year growth in revenue from search, PPC spend, and average order value. Cyber Monday growth wasn’t nearly as high, and average order value was actually down 7.5% this year.

comScore: Cyber Monday Biggest Online Shopping Day Ever

In its look at online shopping patterns overall (not just relative to paid search as above), comScore says Cyber Monday was the busiest online shopping day ever, with more than $1 billion spent in the US.

According to comScore’s research, there were 4% more online shoppers this Cyber Monday than in 2009, and those shoppers spent an average of $114 each — up 12% from a year ago.

Experian Hitwise: Amazon, Wal-Mart Top Shopping Sites

Experian Hitwise focused on individual web sites and categories that did the best over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping weekend. On both of those days, Hitwise says the top 500 retail sites saw traffic increases compared to 2009 — to the tune of a 13% increase on Black Friday and a 16% increase on Cyber Monday. Here’s a look at the Cyber Monday chart showing the top retail sites.

The top five retailers were the same on Black Friday as you see above.

Conclusion

By all accounts above, search advertising and e-commerce in general has had a great holiday season so far, and there are still about three weeks to go before Christmas. Even outside of the primary research companies and the formal studies discussed above, there’s anecdotal evidence to consider, too: George Michie of the Rimm-Kaufman Group (and a Search Engine Land columnist) recently posted on the company’s blog that retail results he saw over Black Friday and Cyber Monday were “off the charts,” with gains between 50% and 150% this year compared to 2009. And there are a few comments on that post from others seeing similar results.