Web Campaigns for Mattresses Defy Tradition

Numbers show bedding advertisers approach TV and digital quite differently in their web campaigns

While TV advertising for mattresses spikes every summer from Memorial Day through Labor Day, that ad spend does not appear to correlate with the industry’s ad spending on the web, according to “Mattress Advertising: Seasonality in TV and Paid Search,” a blog post by Jim Leichenko at AdGooroo.com. Instead, data from a three-year period shows that paid-search advertising by mattress retailers tends to jump in November and December.

The implication, AdGooroo says, is that advertisers don’t tie paid-search campaigns to the mattress industry’s traditional, summer holiday promotions, but instead align with more general retail trends in paid search.

Specifically, AdGooroo examined Google desktop text ad activity in the United States on the top 151 mattress keywords, from January 2013 through December 2015.

It found that the months of November and December averaged the highest paid-search spend, at about $2.6 million per month; single-month ad spending topped out at $4 million in November 2015 alone.

During the same period, in the month of August, TV advertising averaged $56 million per month. May and July also were big months for mattress advertising on TV, averaging $51 million and $46 million, respectively, compared with an average of $35 million per month across the other nine months of the year.

It appears that when it comes to paid search, mattress advertisers are following the crowd and upping their digital ad spend during the winter holiday shopping season, when so many shoppers are online looking for bargains.

Loom & Leaf, Sam’s Club and US-Mattress were the top three paid-search advertisers in the mattress category in December 2013, 2014 and 2015, by ad spending. This word cloud (above left) illustrates the most effective keywords and phrases found in paid-search text ads about bedding. As you can see, “free delivery” drew the most mattress shopper clicks.

AdGooroo also took a look at desktop text ads for 151 mattress keywords for the first seven months of 2016. It found that 1,338 advertisers spent a total of $37 million on the mattress-shopping keyword group, at an average click-through rate of 3.64%, and an average cost per click of $2.89.

The top 20 advertisers by paid-search spend from January through August were Select Comfort ($2.9 million), Tuft & Needle ($2.6 million), Sears ($2.2 million), Casper ($2.1 million) and Macy’s ($2 million).

AdGooroo is a search-marketing intelligence company and part of London-based, multinational advertising and market intelligence agency Kantar Media.