The market research company for search engine advertisers, AdGooroo, has published a report titled “ The Luxury Market and Paid Search” that has analyzed the paid search activity by luxury brands and retailers in the U.S. across five categories namely beauty & cosmetics, apparel, handbags, shoes and watches. Within the above mentioned categories, Top 10 Luxury Brands by paid search spending, Share of Voice based on paid search impressions, Top 10 Retailers by paid search spending and Retailers Sponsoring Branded Keywords of the top 10 brands were examined.
Among the top personal luxury companies, five of them spent nearly $22 million on Google AdWords desktop/tablet text ads across their brands in 2013. Apparel gained a spot right at the top of the list in overall spend by both retailers as well as brands with a spending of $3, 825, 000 and $3,310,000 respectively.
In four out of five categories studied, top ten retailers in the luxury space outspent the top luxury brands. Retailers commanded the share of voice across all five categories, based on impressions. They spent nearly five times as much on luxury shoe keywords and nearly two times as much on luxury beauty and cosmetics terms as the brands did on the same keywords. The only category where brands outspent retailers was Handbags.
Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Barney’s, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus are among the top spending retailers in the luxury category. A number of unauthorized retailers were advertising discounted or secondhand merchandise by sites including DesignerApparel.com and BagBorrowOrSteal.com. The most activity by unauthorized dealers advertising in paid search was in the luxury watch category.
Amazon appeared among the top 10 retail spenders in every category and came only second after Chanel as the top retailer spender in the beauty and cosmetics category. Zappos, owned by Amazon made the list of top spending retailers in the luxury shoes and luxury handbags categories.
Click here to download the full report.