For those of you who have never heard of Small Business Saturday, it is a special shopping day created by AMEX on the Saturday after Black Friday/Thanksgiving to support small business sales too. Here at KSP, we salute small business as most of our clients are small retailers and wholesale product or service providers. Any reason to spend more with the underdog small businesses is definitely looked highly upon even if the shopping day was deigned to help AMEX drive additional sales after the blow out with major retailers the day before.
This year, Small Business Saturday fell on Nov 24th. We decided to see if anybody actually paid attention to the 3rd ever shopping day and we were quite astonished at what we found. We had our staff of ppc management and search analysts segment out the online retailer clients from all the other wholesale and B2B businesses and do a year over year comparison.
Not only did we see a 10% increase in click traffic to the subset from last year, but Saturday surpassed Black Friday traffic by an average of a few hundred visits per retailer. Last year Small Business Saturday fell short of Black Friday traffic by almost 5%.
We can correlate that 10% of increased traffic likely resulted in 8-9% in marginal sales this year. This is quite the victory for small businesses.
And while Cyber Monday had nearly 20% more visitor traffic than Saturday, there was less than 1% increase from 2011. Go Small Business Saturday!
