Table of Contents:
“Would you like to open up our store credit card and save 20% on your purchase today?”
Nothing says Happy Holidays like a brand new Old Navy credit card and $8 in savings.
These days, every retailer offers their own branded store credit card. If you’ve done holiday shopping this year, you have likely turned down multiple store credit offers so far. Or, you may be one of the 500,000 Americans who opened a store credit card on Black Friday. But if you are anything like us, you probably still have some last minute holiday shopping to do.
Did you know that Sears was the first retailer to offer a store credit card back in 1911? Over the last decade store credit card popularity has become a big business. To the benefit of retailers, store credit cards encourage consumers to spend more money in-store and save retailers money on processing fees. And, store credit cards help retailers tailor their marketing strategy to individual consumers.
However, store credit cards have received quite a bit of criticism recently. The average interest rate for a store card is about 24%, compared with an average of 15% for all credit cards.
At LendEDU, we thought it would be interesting to study which store credit cards are the most popular this holiday season. Which store cards are consumers thinking about? Which store cards do people actually want?
Over the weekend, we drank some hot cocoa and did a little research using Google search interest data. Here is a list of the 100 most popular store credit cards by monthly search volume on Google. Warning: the results are interesting!
Top 100 Most Popular Store Credit Cards in 2016
Note: Some of the credit cards listed above may no longer be available. But… people are still looking for them.
Methodology
Keyword analysis software from Ahrefs was the main tool used for data collection in this study. All data was collected during the second week of December, and we believe the data is representative of holiday organic search trends.
For those who do not know, Ahrefs can analyze organic search metrics for words and phrases (commonly referred to as keywords) that are entered into Google; additionally, it can output data for multiple keyword phrases that are relevant to one specific input keyword. In short, it is a tool for measuring keyword search performance in Google and for researching relating keywords.
With Ahrefs, keyword data can be exported into a spreadsheet along with search engine metrics. Typical metrics include keyword difficulty, organic search volume, clicks on google, cost per search, and return rate.
The only metric used in this study was organic search volume. In other words, organic search volume is the number of times each month a certain phrase or keyword is entered into Google. It is commonly referenced as “monthly searches” or “monthly search volume.”
To start this study, the term “credit card” was inputted into the ahrefs keyword search tool which generated over 60,000 entries, or phrases, that were related to the term “credit card.” This list of related search terms was initially sorted by search volume, so the most searched for keywords were towards the top of the list. Some examples include terms such as “Victoria’s Secret Credit Card,” “credit cards for bad credit,” target credit card,” chase credit card login,” and many other similar phrases.
130 different store credit cards were extracted from the first 1,000 rows of keywords. This list was entered into the keyword batch analyzer from Ahrefs. Each store card was entered as an exact match phrase (*store name* + “credit card”). The top 100 store credit cards by monthly search volume were listed in the publication, and cards that tied were listed in alphabetical order.
See more of LendEDU’s Research