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A report from Hitwise shows that online traffic connected to Black Friday has grown at a higher rate than it did in 2006. For 2007, it's increased 52 percent over last year.

Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart (WMT) has been one the big winners so far, with their early announcment of discounts this year. It's helped especially in search, where queries have increased by 90 percent over last year for all "Black Friday ads." Since 2005 they've increased by 900 percent.

Wal-Mart has received the most traffic so far from Black Friday advertising websites for the week ending November 10, 2007. Coming in second was Sears, with Best Buy (BBY) third for U.S. Traffic. (This was among a select group of sites.)

For the Hitwise U.S. Retail 100 Index, Amazon.com was the most visited site in the index for the week ending November 10, getting 11 percent of all visits in the index.

According to Heather Dougherty, director of research at Histwise, the reason for the growth is this:

"Consumers are becoming increasingly more knowledgeable about the availability of Black Friday promotions online and are actively seeking out the websites which offer the advertisements before public release."

Some retailers have fought hard to keep their promotions secret, but it's been difficult. In a way, it actually gets people curious, and so increases more traffic. Something to think about in our marketing efforts.

The most popular search terms during the period were iPods and Uggs (boot). The other top search terms were "wii," "xbox 360" and "playstation 3." The rest of the top 10 search terms were variations of uggs and ipod like ugg boots, ugg, ipod nano, and ipods.