WebProNews

Circuit City closing down was obviously good news for electronics retailer competitors. But which ones are reaping the benefits the most? They are whom you’d expect: Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

Hitwise reports on where online consumers go after being greeted with CircuitCity.com’s Sorry-we’re-closed message. Twenty percent of them float downstream to Best Buy’s website. Ten percent go to Wal-Mart, followed by Kmart.com and Sears.com with four and two percent respectively.

These are obviously the brands on the top of consumers’ minds and their online behavior might very well mimic offline behavior: Oh, Circuit City’s closed. Let’s go to Best Buy across the street, then.

But what was really interesting about the report was Radio Shack’s aggressive poaching of Circuit City customers in the search results. Though non-searching consumers may not have thought of Radio Shack as often, searchers using branded terms from a portfolio of Circuit City’s portfolio of branded terms were met with paid search ads for Radio Shack.

Three percent clicked through to Radio Shack’s website. Best Buy, on the other hand, ran no targeted search campaign, and only just over one percent clicked through to the site from the organic results. This was a very clever and apparently effective strategy on Radio Shack’s part.