14 DAY TRIAL // Market researcher Hitwise Today released a report concerning the most popular websites on Thanksgiving Day and on Black Friday, revealing that this year's traffic was well increased since 2006. According to Hitwise, the Thanksgiving traffic grew up with 20 percent in comparison with the same period of the last year while Black Friday came with an increase of 16 percent. Being known that Thanksgiving and Black Friday are two of the busiest days online as numerous consumers connect to the web to buy gifts and all sorts of things, it's obvious that the online shopping websites recorded that largest part of the traffic.
"The increase in traffic to retail sites on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday signals a strong online holiday season," said Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise. "The big box retailers are taking advantage of their sites to heavily promote both in-store offerings and online-only specials to drive traffic even while stores are closed to capture holiday dollars."
Hitwise reported that Wal-Mart.com is the lucky winner of the competition with a percentage of 15.80 points on Thanksgiving and 10.76 points on Black Friday referring to the total number of visits. The second place was won by BestBuy with 8.76 percent and 6.11 percent while the third place went to Circuit City with 7.22 percent and 5.54 percent. Amazon, one of the top shopping technologies which was expected to be placed among the most popular services, came only on the fourth place with 7.03 percent of the total visits on Thanksgiving.
"Online traffic to a custom category of leading Black Friday advertising websites increased 45 percent on Thanksgiving and 43 percent on Black Friday, respectively, compared to last year," Hitwise added in the report. "Black Friday advertising websites sent 17 percent more traffic to the top 100 retail websites on Thanksgiving Day and 40 percent more traffic on Black Friday compared to Black Friday and Thanksgiving in 2006."