Tuesday, Feb. 6 bore the brunt of Valentine’s Day e-commerce this year, hosting the largest amount of pre-Valentine’s Day traffic. Monday the fifth was the runner up among actual shoppers, while the higher broadband rates usually found in offices and a desire to keep planned purchases hidden kept woo-ers off the Web during the weekend.
But if Web surfers weren’t buying, they were certainly looking right up until the actual day. As of Feb. 13, Monday Feb. 12 saw the greatest amount of surfing, according to a OneupWeb study.
Google generated most of the searches for love offerings. The search service delivered 75% of the traffic, and 72% of the sales. Yahoo finished second in both categories, providing 16% of traffic and 18% of sales, while MSN trailed both, yielding 9% of traffic and 10% of sales.
But the survey held bad news for those looking to boost their fortunes through keyword purchase: Natural (unpaid) search results generated 34% more traffic, and 21% more sales, than pay-per-click ads or sponsored results.
Oneupweb measured the online search behavior of more than 250,000 unique visitors across a variety of retail Web sites.