Textbooks Makes Top 10 Back-to-School List

Content Manager

The search term “textbooks” was the top searched keyword for back-to-school, according to a blog post by AdGooroo who decided to examine paid search trends from last summer to predict the 2013 back-to-school retail season.

AdGooroo examined 318 back-to-school terms.  Each of these back-to-school keywords registered more than $10,000 of pay per click spending  in July and August of 2012 across the U.S., for AdWords, Yahoo! and Bing according to the blog post.

The term “textbooks” generated a spending total of  $829,857 and garnered 18,866,205 in impressions with “used textbooks”  and “textbooks online” adding  $154,718 in spending and 5,063,624 in impressions.

Following “textbooks”  the second highest keyword was “school supplies”  which generated spending of $153,625 and 17,300,378 in impressions, according to the blog post.

Other search terms in the top 10 include “best laptops for college,”  which generated $43,000 in spending and nearly 570,000 impressions, and “school uniforms,”  which generated spending of $106,324 and 8,489,670 in impressions.

According to the blog post, AdGooroo has seen a sizable increase in year-to-year paid search spending for back-to-school keyword terms going back to 2010. Advertisers have spent $1.9 million across the U.S. Adwords, Yahoo! Bing Network from June to August 2012 on back-to-school efforts, representing a 73% increase over the same period in 2011.

Spending on text PPC ads in June 2013 was down 37% compared to June 2012, likely because of a large shift in click and spend to AdWords’ Product listing Ads.

AdGooRoo expects spending on text ads triggered by back-to-school terms in August 2013 to be near or above $1 million based on strong back-to-school advertising in broadcast media and a bump in mobile search spend after the implementation of Google enhanced campaigns in July, according to the blog post.

Amazon was the number one top 20 back-to-school  advertisers by impressions in July and August of 2012.  Walmart came in the second spot.

Both cheapesttextbooks.com and chegg.com had more than two million impressions during the period giving them third and fourth spot on the list.  Ebay’s book discounter half.com garnered 1.8 million impressions and secured the number six spot.

Together with discountsschoolsupply.com all three of these textbook merchants generated more back-to-school search impressions than larger retail brands like Target, Barnes & Noble and J.C. Penney.  Other large retailers include Office Depot, Staples and OfficeMax and EastBay.com.