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Luxury retailers outspent brands on paid search in 2013: report

July 28, 2014

Gucci editorial image by Saks Gucci editorial image by Saks

 

A new report by AdGooroo finds that luxury retailers outspent luxury brands in most categories of paid search on Google in 2013.

Luxury retailers outspent the brands in apparel, beauty and cosmetics, shoes and watches, while brands mustered the victory for handbags. As many brands seek to divert in-store traffic away from retailers to their independent locations, investing in paid search will act as a critical link.

AdGooroo is a market research company for search engine advertisers. The report can be downloaded here.

Spending spree

AdGooroo determined that luxury brands collectively spent $3.3 million on Google AdWords for apparel, compared to $3.8 million by retailers.

Louis Vuitton spent the most out of any examined brand or retailer with a $1.3 million investment in apparel paid search. The highest spending retailer was Neiman Marcus with $770,000.

Brands spent $638,000 on paid search for beauty, compared to $1.36 million by retailers. However, Chanel spent the most overall in this category.

Chanel also rose to the top of the handbag paid search category, spending $816,000. Handbags represented the only category in which brands outspent retailers, with about $2.97 million spent compared to $2.85 million.

Rolex was the highest spending luxury watchmaker for Google AdWords.

Amazon came in the top 10 for retailers in all of the categories that were studied. Overall, the report demonstrates how competitive the paid search battles are becoming.

Similarly, hotel brands are increasingly squeezed by the metasearch dominance of online travel agencies and Google, according to a new report by L2.

The Metasearch Insight Report argues that hotel brands must invest heavily in the big metasearch players, TripAdvisor, Kayak and Google, in order to stay relevant. Brands that gain top placement within these search engines see dramatic increases in Web site traffic (see story).