8 Staggering Statistics about This Holiday Season’s Rush and 3 Ways to React

As companies have realized in years past Black Friday deals extend to online shoppers. Because black Friday comes before Cyber Monday, there has been a pretty even competition between two of the busiest shopping days of the year, so although it’s no secret that online shopping is the new thing (and we would expect to see more activity than Black Friday), the number were still a little bit staggering. The most shocking of them all? Thanksgiving was thrown into the mix this year as a solid contender with some very interesting trends.

If you didn’t hear, below are the numbers we saw this past week for various sources regarding the three “holidays” and their success:

• E-commerce search spend rose 19.6 percent on Thanksgiving this year –Kenshoo
• Cyber Monday online sales topped $3 billion, setting the record for the biggest day of online sales in US history. This is an increase of 16 percent from last year, and we saw 200 million visits to 4,500 retail websites all generating $3.07 billion. –Adobe
• The average order value among advertisers on its platform hit $134, just below the $137 average seen on Black Friday –HookLogic
• On Cyber Monday, Smartphones drove 43 percent of traffic and 24 percent of sales with an average conversion rate of 3.04 percent. –ChannelAdvisor
• In-store retail sales dropped by $1.2 billion on Thanksgiving and $2 million on Thanksgiving. –ABC News
• On Cyber Monday, E-Commerce revenue rose 16.2 percent from a year ago. –Custora

As you can see, Cyber Monday was really where all of the major statistics happened. I recommend checking out this article from MarketingLand to see even more statistics about that day in particular if you’re interested in how this differed by industry and device.

What This All Means to You and Your Online Holiday Shopping Strategy

So now that the year is over it’s time to focus on your general holiday shopping, which should still last about another month. But what can you learn from this year’s numbers? There are a few things you should be doing now in preparation for next year:

1. Remember that your data in Google Analytics isn’t going to show you anything past 90 days. This means that you can still wait for the holiday rush to end to gather those numbers, but don’t wait too long. You will want to have an idea of the trends that your specific company saw so that you can be prepared with the right product offers, email marketing campaigns, content, and more at the right times.
2. We all know that mobile is crucial, but you shouldn’t forget tablets. Having a responsive web design is a start, but actually optimizing for tablets is also important, which you can learn more about here. According to the same ChannelAdvisor report, tablets drove 12 percent of Cyber Monday traffic with 11 percent of sales and a 5.41 average conversion rate. Not bad considering the staggering total numbers mentioned above.
3. Display ads are crucial. They drove 57 percent more sales compared to Cyber Monday last year, so if you put more of a focus on other areas of your holiday strategy that’s great, but next year ramp up the display ads. If you’re unfamiliar with how they work, check out the official Google Support page to learn more and this article to make sure they get approved.

Is there anything that you would add to the list of lessons you can learn from the holiday numbers there year? Were there any other interesting statistics that we missed that we should add to the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

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