Social media provided a big bump to Amazon.com, while retailers like Houzz invested heavily in search marketing.

Rochelle Bailis, director of content, Hitwise

Rochelle Bailis, director of content, Hitwise

As the housing market continues to revive in the wake of the financial crisis, competition amongst home goods retailers has become more intense. Analyzing Memorial Day traffic in Home & Garden this year (compared to Memorial Day 2016) provides a snapshot of how brands are staying competitive during peak sales days.

We focused specifically on brands who pulled the highest percentage of traffic from searches around furniture, appliances, décor, home furnishings and garden over the course of this key shopping day.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon pulled the most website visit share compared to the entire online retail industry. As with many retailers, Amazon has been ramping up their paid search clicks in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day.

How home goods retailers drew online traffic around Memorial Day 1Digging deeper, however, it appears Amazon’s increase in traffic isn’t due entirely to search. We compared Amazon’s fastest-growing channel drivers on Memorial Day 2017 to their top channel drivers on Memorial Day of 2016, and found the largest growth actually came from social media.

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Hitwise Memorial Day - Image 2Many other top retailers did rely heavily on search to drive traffic on Memorial Day this year. We see the greatest growth in search share specifically amongst brands like Walmart and Etsy.

Hitwise Memorial Day - Image 3Next, we drilled down specifically on paid clicks to these websites, and compared the relative growth in paid traffic (versus organic traffic) year-on-year. Every single one of these retailers increased their percentage of paid clicks considerably in 2017.

Houzz in particular invested quite heavily in paid search for Memorial Day 2017, and more than tripled their paid traffic from 21% to 67% of website clicks. As you can see in the chart below, this strategy paid off for Houzz, and this year they emerged from little-known home design website into a small but notable player in the Memorial Day market:

Hitwise Memorial Day - Image 4Source: Search and visit data pulled for Memorial Day 2017 (5/29/2017) and Memorial Day 2016 (5/30/3016) using Hitwise Custom Intelligence.

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Hitwise, a division of Connexity Inc., measures online traffic on desktop and mobile devices.

 

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