As the holiday shopping season on Amazon wraps up, it’s a good time to step back to examine the data around what consumers shopped for most, and how this changed from 2021.

The Research:

Momentum Commerce estimated the top average daily search volumes utilizing modeling that combines observed search volumes in each month combined with Amazon’s own search frequency rank data. For this exercise we focused on the month of November in both 2021 and 2022, both of which ran through Cyber Monday.

The Story:

First, let’s identify top gift searches this year that were specific to products released in 2022, removing the possibility of any year-over-year search traffic.

Another class of ‘flash in the pan’ searches are those that skyrocketed in popularity during the 2022 holiday shopping season but are either more evergreen terms or are attached to products that were available in 2021.

Meanwhile, there are a number of searches that were popular purchases in both 2021 and 2022, with estimated volume holding remarkably steady year over year.

While some searches remain popular, most gift giving search activity naturally changes over time. Here are examples of notable terms that dropped precipitously in popularity during the holiday shopping season in 2022, with some context on similar terms that likely took much of that volume.

However, in other cases certain classes of products can become remarkably less popular in a given year across the board. Let’s use laptops as an example.

Big Takeaways for Brands:

• Closely tracking how consumers are searching and finding your products on Amazon is essential to making intelligent decisions around budgeting and improving product page content. This becomes more important during the holiday season, particularly around seasonal terms where search activity will only commence during certain points of the year.
• Site-wide search activity on Amazon helps properly contextualize your brand’s performance compared to the broader market. If sales dropped or rose for specific product types during the holiday season, understanding if consumer demand exhibited similar trends gives you a better idea of whether you actually overperformed or underperformed within the wider marketplace.