After a long extended weekend of football, overeating and hitting the malls, Cyber Monday has descended upon us as another way to get excellent discounts and holiday savings. Cyber Monday symbolizes the beginning of the holiday shopping season online and a quick search across Google, Ask.com, Yahoo and Live Search shows that merchants are addressing its importance in their search marketing campaigns.
Cyber Monday Invented by Shop.org?
One site which all search engines are driving traffic to, and I’m sure there is plenty of type-in traffic as well, is CyberMonday.com which is owned by Shop.org (CyberMonday.org redirects to the .com site and CyberMonday.info is a domain squatter page).
Shop.org of the National Retail Federation, also more or less sponsors the event, invented the holiday and promotes it via public relations and traditional media channels.
CyberMonday.com ranks #1 in Google, Ask.com and LiveSearch for ‘cyber monday’ and #2 in Yahoo (behind Wikipedia’a Cyber Monday entry, which links out to CyberMonday.com in its descriptive content above the External Links area.)
According to the Wikipedia entry and ComScore, online shopping on Cyber Monday hit $485 million in 2005 and $608 million in 2006 (up 26% over 2005). As Cyber Monday becomes more of a legit holiday, expect these numbers to climb today as online retailers prepare for the surge of purchases.
Although BusinessWeek’s Robert Hof reported that Cyber Monday was only the 12th most popular online shopping day back in 2005, however, with an estimated $700 million in sales expected today, the ‘holiday’ may even take effect on employee productivity, as keeping a browser window open for shopping or surfing for web deals will be quite popular.
