Mobile gamers were busy this Thanksgiving, and they weren’t just eating turkey. They downloaded so many games that they created a Thanksgiving surge, according to mobile app developer ad platform Chartboost.

Mobile game downloads jumped on Thanksgiving, not just in the U.S. but around the world. The cost per install (or the promotional cost of getting one user to install an app) also rose on Thanksgiving outside the U.S., but it dropped a tad here. Developers who took the day off may have missed out on an opportunity to promote their apps.

Traffic surged 48 percent in the U.S. compared to the average Thursday while non-U.S. traffic rose 20 percent. Chartboost said that the cost per install dropped in the U.S. because the marginal increase in traffic carried with it ads (interstitials) that have lower bids. Also, U.S. companies that tend to dominate the mobile gaming market had the day off and didn’t optimize their campaigns during the day to capitalize on the large amount of traffic. That means they underestimated the potential of Thanksgiving downloads.

That’s a good lesson as the Christmas holiday season approaches. The data were collected from 8,000 iOS and Android games in the Chartboost network.

[Image credits: The high-tech home, Chartboost]

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Turkey Day is no longer just a day to gorge, give thanks, and watch football. We’re now celebrating our American heritage with our pocketbooks too, using the holiday as an excuse to shop until the tryptophan kicks in.

Internet traffic-watcher Experian measured our fleeting familial attention on Thanksgiving Day and found that online retail-specific traffic increased 71 percent in 2012 compared to 2011. The top 500 retail sites pooled together more than 181 million U.S. web visits for the day.

Amazon, Walmart, Target, BestBuy, and Sears benefited the most from our celebratory dispositions.

With more than 25 million U.S. online visits, not counting mobile traffic, Amazon was the top visited retail site on Thanksgiving Day. The e-commerce haven noticed a 16 percent uptick in web traffic from the previous day, as people (trapped?) at family gatherings turned to the web for a little retail therapy.

BestBuy, the fourth most popular online retail destination, proved it can be more than America’s electronics showroom. Traffic to the big-box retailer’s website skyrocketed by 104 percent between Wednesday and Thursday to reach 11.4 million U.S. visits on Turkey Day, which was good enough to make BestBuy the winner of the highest day-over-day traffic growth award.

Collectively, Americans are shopping more online this holiday week than in years past, Experian found.

“So far this Holiday week of online traffic to the top retail sites is up 8 percent on average,” said Matt Tatham of the Experian Marketing Services.

Photo credit: Sugar Daze/Flickr

After properly stuffing themselves with copious amounts of turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, dressing, and pumpkin pie, eBay saw a ton of people reach for their mobile devices to make some form of payment.

Overall, eBay had a 133 percent increase (compared to the previous year) in mobile transaction for the holiday. It’s online transaction service PayPal also saw a jump of 173 percent in global mobile payments for Thanksgiving 2012, compared to the previous year.

The most popular time to shop on mobile devices with PayPal during the holiday was between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. (PT). Coincidentally, this was also the most popular time for people to upload Turkey day-related photos to Instagram.

The most popular cities using PayPal, according to the company, were Houston at No. 1, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and New York.

EBay predicted it would see a huge boost in mobile transactions for the holiday season in its Q3 earnings report. So that, combined with the growing number of people using mobile devices in general makes this particular piece of news pretty unsurprising.

Did you do any shopping from your smartphone or tablet yesterday? Let us know in the comment section below.

More than two-thirds (68 percent) of employed adults in the U.S. check their work email on traditional holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, and 27 percent of those who check email do so several times a day, according to data compiled by email and social intelligence startup Xobni. The online survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, polled 2,810 adults in November 2011 on their holiday email behaviors.

Okay, so we check our email. Guilty as a charged. Plus, more and more of us are always toting around email-capable smartphones so that makes sense. But perhaps more telling of our always-on, work-related holiday email patterns is this little nugget: 79 percent of those folks who check email on their holiday vacays said they received a work-related email from a coworker or client. That’s right, your coworkers are sending you action items when they should be sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Of course, you may not mind the work diversion — and you wouldn’t be alone. Nineteen percent of those who received work emails on holidays said they were “thankful for the distraction” or “relieved.”

If this all sounds familiar that’s because Xobni conducted the same study in 2010 with similar results. The same percentage of people (79 percent) expect to receive work-related emails on holidays this year, but the number of people who expect to check their work emails has dropped from 59 percent in 2010 to 55 percent in 2011. But Xobni also found fewer folks will loathe the never-ending stream of messages in their inbox, as just 37 percent (as opposed to 41 percent in 2010) of workers said they felt “annoyed, frustrated or resentful” about holiday emails.

It even turns out that our holiday work preferences and patterns vary by our age and gender. Men, for instance, are still more likely than women to check their work email, but the percentage gap is closing.

You can have a look at the infographic below (click to enlarge) for some of Xobni’s other demographic findings.

[Image via Flickr/geishaboy500]