Almost everyone loves a bargain and during the cost conscious holiday shopping season last year, discounts were more popular than ever. This year looks to be no exception for the discount hungry consumer with searches up 19% last week as compared to 2008. Searches on a portfolio of search terms around coupons and promotions from specific retailers (e.g ‘target coupons’, ‘target coupon codes’ and ‘target free shipping code’) peaked during the week of Cyber Monday, up 76% from the same week in 2007. Post holiday, the week ending Dec. 27, 2009 followed with the second highest share of traffic from the portfolio of coupon terms and increased 66% compared to the previous year.

The majority of the searches result in a visit to the Rewards & Directories category, which includes websites that aggregate retailer promotions and coupon offers. Other searches do result in a visit directly to the retailer and multi-category department stores, followed by apparel and electronics retailers received the highest share of clicks during the peak week of Cyber Monday last year.

Curious about who is searching for the specific coupons to help retailers and coupon websites identify who to target, we looked at the demographics for the portfolio through custom analysis during the 8 weeks ending Dec. 27, 2008 to cover the majority of the holiday gift buying season. The split is even for male & female searchers in terms of gender. The household income data is interesting because while the greatest share of searches are from those making between $30k-$60k and $60k-$100k, when compared to the online population, the searchers tend to be more affluent and over-index for those making between $60k-$100k and $100k-$150k.


Just over half of the searchers were between the ages of 25 to 44 last year and the younger searchers aged 25 to 34 were more likely to search for retailer coupons than the rest of the online population.