14 DAY TRIAL // Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals probably made a lot of people happy, be them shoppers or retailers. What started out as a way of getting rid of unwanted inventory in the US has become an international phenomenon.
It's no surprise then that more and more people are aware of the deals they can get on those days and they were quite interested in finding the places that had the deals they wanted the most.
This, obviously meant turning to a search engine. Google has shared some search stats for the long weekend indicating that Black Friday in particular is more popular than ever.
"The search trends clearly showed consumers are more aware of and interested in special deals available over the holiday shopping weekend," Google wrote.
"Searches for [black friday deals] were up by 30% from last year, and searches for [cyber monday sales] and [cyber monday coupons] grew 15% year over year. Further, on Black Friday, half of the top 20 rising searches on Google involved retailers or deals," it revealed.
Cyber Monday was a popular search as well, hitting the top five growing searches last Monday. However, even though it's an online phenomenon, Cyber Monday is still not as popular as Black Friday.
Unsurprisingly, more and more people used their phones to get to the stores they wanted or to discover good deals around them.
"Searches for [mobile coupons] were up 90% over last year’s volume and mobile search volume for retail-related searches on Black Friday this year was up 200% over Black Friday last year," Google explained.
That's hardly surprising, but Google has been very bullish about mobile web use and mobile search for quite a while. Its bet on Android is a strong indication that it believes more and more people are going mobile and more internet usage will come from mobile phones or tablets. Then again, Google constantly pushing mobile usage may make this a self-fulfilling prophecy.