The Consumer Electronics Retailing Loser of Black Friday Weekend

Retailers are spending millions of advertising dollars hoping to entice shoppers into their stores during this year's shortened holiday season.  But between Best Buy (BBY 3.63%) and Radio Shack (RSHCQ), one consumer electronics retailer shorted out on Black Friday weekend. Which one was it?

Dollars not well spent
An analysis recently released by Placed and Kantar Media unveiled which retailers had the best Black Friday weekend based on one key metric, "cost per visitor share." This metric gives insight as to how well television ads helped drive in-store customer traffic. The study focused on three categories, including department stores and mass merchandisers, home improvement stores, and consumer electronic stores. Last week, I examined the results from the department stores and mass merchandisers category and home improvement stores . Today, we'll take a look at consumer electronics stores.

(RSHCQ)

The broader picture
One metric an investor can look at to gain insight into how much money a company spends on ads is its selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs as a percent of revenue. A company's SG&A costs include much more than advertising, but we can use SG&A as a percent of revenue as a broad metric to see how much of a company's revenue is spent on things like advertising. Check out how the two consumer electronics retailers fare:

Source: Yahoo! Finance 

Taking a look at these figures coupled with the cost-per-visitor-share metric, we can see that while Best Buy spends less of its revenue on things like advertising, each dollar it spent on TV ads translated into more share on Black Friday weekend. By comparison, Radio Shack spends a much greater percentage of its revenue on SG&A expenses. The Shack also received much less share on Black Friday weekend. In broader terms, Best Buy appears to spend money much more efficiently than Radio Shack.