Holiday Season Online Spending Up 15% Y-O-Y

Americans have spent $35.3 billion online for the holiday season-to-date (November 1 – December 26), representing a 15% increase from the corresponding days last year, according to December 2011 analysis from comScore. $2.8 billion was spent online in the week ending December 25, marking a 16% year-over-year increase from $2.45 billion in the corresponding week of 2010.
Overall, Cyber Monday ranks as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive year, at $1.25 billion, although it was accompanied by 9 other billion-dollar spending days.

Search Spend Up

According to December data from Kenshoo, for the week before Christmas, online retail search advertising spend increased 39% year-over-year, with both clicks and online retail revenue driven by search advertising increasing by 24%. For the holiday season-to-date, online retail search advertising spend has increased 30% year-over-year, while retail revenue driven by search advertising spend has increased 22%.

Christmas Day Sales Jump, Driven By Mobile Growth

Meanwhile, IBM Smarter Commerce reports that online sales grew by 16.4% on Christmas Day compared to 2010, with 18.3% of all online sessions on retailers’ sites initiated from a mobile device, representing a 118% increase from 8.4% the previous year. The iPad led all Christmas Day 2011 device traffic at 7%, followed by the iPhone at 6.4% and Android at 5%.
The share of online sales from mobile devices reached 14.4%, almost triple the 5.3% from last year.

Digital Content Sales Soar

comScore’s data indicates that Christmas Day saw a dramatic increase in purchases of digital content and subscriptions, a retail category that includes digital downloads of music, TV, movies, e-books, and applications. Whereas on an average day during the 2011 holiday season-to-date, digital content and subscriptions accounted for 2.8% of retail e-commerce sales, on Christmas Day the category accounted for more than 20% of sales.
According to December 2011 analysis from Flurry, nearly a quarter of a billion application downloads occurred on Christmas Day 2011, more than double any other day in the history of iOS and Android devices, save for the previous day, which delivered roughly 150 million downloads.

Other Findings:

• IBM said online sales grew 27.8% on December 26, dubbed “Mega Monday,” from the previous year. For the day, 16.4% of all online sessions on retailers’ sites were initiated from a mobile device, up from 7.8% in 2010. Sales from mobile devices showed even more impressive growth, jumping from 4.3% in 2010 to 11.3% in 2011.
• The iPad (6%) led all mobile device traffic on Mega Monday, followed by the iPhone (5.8%) and Android (4.6%).

About the Data: The dataset examined by Kenshoo represents more than 25 billion total search advertising impressions, nearly 300 million clicks and over 7 million online sales transactions.
Source: www.marketingcharts.com