Commentary
The Click Cost Of Retailers Attracting Consumer Attention
- by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 24, 2015
Retailers will spend on average between $0.90 and $3.41 per click to catch the attention of consumers during the Black Friday holiday shopping season. During this time, companies pay
less for more.
Target spent $1 million -- the highest amount -- on 158 of the 161 keywords running across Google related to Black Friday between Sept. 27 and Nov. 22, 2015, earning 22.75% click share at an estimated cost of 90 cents per click.
AdGooroo published the research Tuesday, reexamining paid-search activity for desktop on Black Friday keyword group running on Google. So far this holiday season, 1,226 advertisers have spent $7.3 million sponsoring the "black friday" keyword group, and the top term this year is "black friday deals," with nearly $3.7 million spent.
Home Depot is spending the most for clicks. The home improvement store spent $87,000 on 31 of the 161 keywords running across Google related to Black Friday between Sept. 27, and Nov. 22, 2015, earning 3.70% click share at an estimated cost of $3.41 per click.
No. 2 in terms of the highest per click spend is Groupon. The faltering company that pioneered local daily deals spent $164,000 on 73 of the 161 keywords running across Google related to Black Friday, earning 3.60% click share at an estimated cost of $2.63 per click.
Aside from Target, Best Buy also continues to keep CPCs down. The company spent $382,000 on 131 keywords earning 8.80% market share at $0.91 per click.
Rounding out the top five in terms of CPC, Macy's spent $388,000 on 115 keywords, earning 3.60% market share at a $1.09 cost per click, and Walmart, which plans to start selling Cyber Monday deals at 8 p.m. Sunday night, spent $395,000 on 161 keywords, earning 10.40% market share at a cost of $1.23 per click.
Laurie Sullivan is a writer and editor for MediaPost. You can reach Laurie at lauriesullivan@gmail.com.
While I love AdGooroo, I think it's important for readers of this research to know that the CPC estimates paid by advertisers and click volumes in reality tend to diverge enough from the actual numbers to make this kind of research somewhat limiting. When we've looked at third party sources, including AdGooroo, we have seem a wide diversity of inaccuracy on spend numbers when we compare to our actual data. Of course we do that so that we can advise clients to what level they should trust the third party sources. Sources like AdGooroo are most valuable (in my opinion) for directional trends and a bit less so for comparative purposes when two advertisers have very similar budgets and keyword baskets.
P.S. Further complicating matters, sophisticated bid management systems alone or coupled with AdWords Scripts often manipulate bids based on device, time of day or geography in near real-time, bidding more for clicks when those clicks are super-valuable and conserving budget when it doesn't make sense to bid aggressively.
P.P.S. I'd love it if some of the advertisers in this column or their agencies commented on the actual data ;-)
I agree with Kevin. I would also point out that it's not what you spend on clicks that matters, it's what you earn from them by way of Return on Ad Spend. I manage ecommerce client accounts purely from profitability, and they pay me a profit-share in commission.