Cyber Monday and search

As holiday shopping heats up to record #s (Comscore networks reports that 2006 #s for retail purchases already show a healthy 23% increase over last year’s. A whopping $600 mln is expected from the coming CyberMonday). Another e-marketer study of relevance shows that paid search is still the most results-delivering online marketing method (42% of respondents) compared to email, rich media and display ads. It would be interesting to know how people’s travel-related search habits change in the holiday season. Shoppers use a combination of reviews, blogs, shopping engines, free-shipping offers, word-of-mouth and more to ferret out the best deal. Plenty more time is devoted to personal preferences and on researching the trendiest thing around. One would assume that people have less time to invest in travel-related-search at this time and would hence fall back on tried and tested branded properties OR frequent guest hotels. One would also think that homeward bound holiday travellers use search a little differently than those looking to book time-off-vacations. Could it be worthwhile to advertise on gaming blogs and top-gifts-2006 guides where the majority of eyeballs would be, in addition to search? Perhaps some insights in this area might help…..