As these stats show, Argos, John Lewis and Curry’s all experienced higher then expected traffic levels.  

Compared to Black Friday 2013, the three retailers experienced 100% more traffic than this time last year, 162% more for Currys. 

Still, this wasn’t AO.com’s problem and, since it sells many of the same electrical products as these retailers, it decided to take advantage with some PPC ads. 

So, while the Argos site looked like this…

AO.com put up this ad: 

When John Lewis couldn’t hold up, AO.com did the same: 

The results? 

  • A 43% increase in paid search CTR. 
  • 136% increase in impressions. 
  • A 250% increase in clicks on PPC ads. 

According to Kobi Thompson, Head of Acquisition at ao.com:

Black Friday is bigger than ever in the UK this year, and it seems like none of our competitors anticipated it like we did. We made sure that Black Friday on ao.com went down without a hitch and our hard work paid off.  

Thanks to the lightning quick reactions of our acquisition team we managed to take the traffic that our competitors were forced to turn away or put into queues and turn that traffic into sales. 

For more on PPC, see our comprehensive Paid Search Best Practice Guide.