When you start hearing about doorbuster sales and stores opening at 5 am, it can mean only one thing – Thanksgiving and Black Friday are almost upon us again! Retailers started to promote pre-Black Friday sales as early as late October and have been running sales for much of the month of November, but Friday will herald the official start to the holiday shopping season. Each year Thanksgiving is the peak day for Internet visits to retail websites, followed by Black Friday as consumers take advantage of the holiday to research the Black Friday sales online and shop when many of the stores are closed. The peaks remained the same last year, but overall traffic to retailers was down 11% on Thanksgiving and 5% on Black Friday. The daily visits to the Retail 500 are down compared to last year leading up to the big holiday weekend, but retailers appear poised to attract as many shoppers as possible with deals on hot products like TVs and video games.

Among the major milestone days during the holiday season, visits grew only on the day after Christmas with an increase of 6%. The day after Christmas has become yet another important day online where visits have increased for three consecutive years with many price-sensitive consumers waiting for post-holiday sales for find lower prices, redeem gift cards, and return & exchange unwanted gifts.

We all know the coming days are the big ones for retailers, so we also looked at two of the major sources of traffic for retailers, search and email, around the Thanksgiving holiday to see how much traffic they refer. For this analysis, we looked at downstream traffic from search engines and email to see how much traffic they send down to retail websites.
The share of downstream traffic from search engines to retailers also peaks on Thanksgiving and Black Friday during each holiday season. For example, of all traffic to search engines on Black Friday last year, 8.72% of visits immediately after were to one of the websites in the Hitwise Retail 500. During the 2008 Holiday season, Black Friday surpassed Thanksgiving in terms of receiving a higher share of downstream traffic from search. Traffic to retailers coming from search remains strong throughout the Thanksgiving weekend.

Consumers are also receptive to email (web-based email such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Mail) from retailers once the season gets going and the share of downstream traffic jumps on Thanksgiving, Black Friday. Last year, the downstream share of traffic from email to the Hitwise Retail 500 reached 8.08% on Thanksgiving and 7.68% on Black Friday. Traffic from email is also important on Cyber Monday, where there has been another significant spike during the past two holiday seasons that does not take place with search.