• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 20, 2015

Advertisers may want to stick with investing more in paid-search campaigns to complement sales around Black Friday, compared with Amazon Prime Day. Data shows the made-up holiday around the U.S. Thanksgiving day still draws a larger crowd to retail.

Magnetic, which supports search and site retargeting, analyzed data from its network of sites, comparing Black Friday vs. Amazon Prime Day search volume. Overall, the data found that Black Friday reins over Prime Day for advertisers looking to influence brand preferences, as consumers researched and planned purchases in advance for Black Friday. Prime Day was more spur of the moment. 

On the actual day of the event, search volume was about 4.5 times higher for Black Friday (11/28/14) than it was on Prime Day (7/15/15). For the week leading up to each event (11/21/14 - 11/27/14, and 7/08/15 - 7/14/15), search volume was about 7 times higher for Black Friday terms than for Prime Day search terms. 

Product-level searches saw spikes in volume up to five days before the event, while Prime Day spikes for certain products only occurred on the day of or the day before the event.

This data is based on an analysis of search queries about each sales holiday, and does not include product-level or brand-level terms. The searches were collected through Magnetic's data pool of more than 400,000 sites, including vertical, shopping comparison, and e-commerce sites. 

Mark Ballard, director of research at Merkle RKG, said the data seems to make sense. "Amazon's a big site, but they do not encompass all of retail, and I'd be surprised if Prime Day could come close to the volume of searches we see on Black Friday," he said. 

While Amazon saw higher internal sales numbers on Prime Day compared with Black Friday, customers seemed less than enthused with the deals. It was reflected in negative comments streaming across social media. Magnetic said the lack of enthusiasm was also reflected in search trends.

There were nearly six times as many unique users searching for Black Friday terms than there were users searching for Prime Day terms the week leading up Amazon's made-up holiday. 

On the day of the event, Prime Day shoppers searched about 3.5 times per unique user. For Black Friday, users were searched about four times per unique user on the day of the event. Product-level searches for Black Friday such as laptops and televisions saw spikes in search volume three to five days prior to the event, as opposed to just one day prior for Prime Day.

Overall, Magnetic data shows that Black Friday had a higher volume of unique users searching, a higher volume of searches overall, and that shoppers searched more on average for Black Friday terms and searched earlier in the week for Black Friday product terms.