• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 4, 2012

Though Cyber Monday gets all the attention, it might not be the day to engage holiday shoppers. In fact, interactive video ads that ran on Christmas Day 2011 resulted in engagement rates six times higher than Cyber Monday, according to Web video start-up Jivox.

This coincided with serious growth in online Christmas Day sales, which IBM found jumped 16.4% year-over-year.

What explains this behavior? “We saw online consumers delaying shopping to the very last minute and retailers becoming more aggressive, with typical post-Christmas sales promotions running online on Christmas Eve,” according to Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of Jivox.

Along with retailers, the findings have implications for brand marketers, too. “For those of us in digital marketing, this has resulted in higher online ad spend as brands increasingly look to engage consumers online,” Nesamoney explained. “Also, this has implications for brand marketers that will need to plan accordingly to the evolving holiday season commerce cycle.”

For its research, Jivox analyzed 10 of the top holiday season interactive video ad campaigns using BrandGage, which collects user engagement data in real-time from interactive video ads and determines user intent.

The data showed that due to interactive video advertising, consumers increasingly moved from awareness to purchase consideration during the holiday season. 

On average, between Thanksgiving and New Year, 8.6% of consumers who viewed an interactive video ad considered a purchase, according to Jivox. This was three times the typical average for interactive video ad engagement, and more than 10-times the average performance of a standard banner ad click-through rate.

Among the 10 leading brand campaigns between Thanksgiving and New Year's 2011, the overall engagement rateaveraged 1.37% in the weeks leading up to Cyber Monday, Jivox reports.

The first spike in engagement rates began Cyber Monday at 1.6%, and climbed to 6.73% by Wednesday. 

Meanwhile, engagement rates reached an average of 10% Christmas week, and peaked at 15.9% on the day before Christmas Eve

On Christmas Day, average engagement with an ad was nearly 8%.