With one week left to go, Black Friday (aka the day after Thanksgiving) is almost upon us. Historically, Black Friday sales were typically called After-Thanksgiving sales, but thanks to a growing number of websites leaking retailer promotions, Black Friday has become part of the vernacular for consumers (rather than an industry term). Both searches around Black Friday and traffic to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites has been increasing over the past 6 weeks, but fewer publicized sales to date and a late Thanksgiving has the total market share of visits currently lower than the same timeframe last year.

The searches including ‘black friday’ in the query have increased in complexity and gotten longer over the past three years when comparing the breadth of search terms during the peak week, growing 54% year-over-year to reach 4,605 combinations during the spike for ‘black friday’ searches during the last holiday season. The number of websites receiving traffic from Black Friday searches increased to 416, up 16% in 2007 from 358 websites during the previous year.

One of the largest shifts in search behavior that was driving traffic to the Black Friday websites was the inclusion of a retailer’s name as shoppers sought out deals from specific retailers. During the peak week of Black Friday traffic in 2006, 40% of the searches included a retailer name, which increased to 51% during the same week in 2007.

For retailers who are deciding which Black Friday websites to work with, for the week ending 11/15/2008, BlackFriday.info and Black Friday Advertisements captured 65% of visits to the category. The top 5 websites represent 93% of the total visits to the category last week, providing an opportunity to work with a few of the websites but still capture the majority of the audience seeking out and comparing Black Friday deals.

Next week will be an interesting one to see if the shopping category starts getting more traffic as retailers ramp up promotional activity and consumers begin to react. With the Thanksgiving holiday falling late this year, we’ve been in somewhat of a holding pattern that is exacerbated by economic conditions as we wait to see if consumers are going to start shopping.