Holiday Search Spending and the “Cyber Monday Hangover”

As Skai continues to monitor advertiser trends during the holiday season, a few things are coming into focus. First and foremost, we’ve been modifying and improving our methodology and filtering to make sure we have accurate data. In doing so, we are tracking more growth on a few key dates that we reported on previously. Our revised analysis shows that eCommerce search spend in the United States, among advertisers who were active in both 2014 and 2015 was up +36% on Thanksgiving and +11% on Black Friday.

The chart below shows the total spending (U.S., eCommerce, “same store”) broken down by week number and day of week so we can more easily visualize the year-over-year changes.

From this data, we can see that eCommerce search ad spending for Black Friday this year has almost caught up with Cyber Monday spending from last year. We can also see that the weekday spending immediately after Cyber Monday has experienced greater growth than we have seen elsewhere in the season.

Call it the “hangover effect” of Cyber Monday. Qualitatively, we are seeing more and more advertisers extend their Cyber Monday campaigns and promotions, and the measurable result is that their search budgets maintain higher levels of spending for a longer period of time.

As the notion of Cyber Monday matures, it is beginning to fulfill both of the claims made as to its origins. First, that it has become, in fact, the biggest online shopping day of the season, which it emphatically wasn’t when the term was first coined. And second, that it signifies the true start of a more sustained seasonal ad campaign in paid search and other channels, rather than just a series of single-day spikes across the space of a month or so.