If online retailers and analysts were concerned about whether the 2017 holiday season would perform as hoped, the numbers emerging from the first week of this critical shopping period have put them to rest, with online transactions for Black Friday and Cyber Monday setting U.S. records this year.
The Namogoo data team uncovered some meaningful insights about how consumer shopping behavior contributed to the collective success of online retailers during this crucial peak season weekend.
Namogoo continuously analyzes over 500 million website page views every day across top retail sites and pools this data to identify eCommerce trends and benchmarks.
Here’s what we found for the period Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2017:
eCommerce businesses capitalize on big gains in traffic…
Unsurprisingly, retailers enjoyed significant increases in their overall website traffic and conversion rates. As compared to the previous six Fridays, Black Friday produced 4.5 times the traffic, and converted at four times the rate across all online shopping channels.
When it comes to website traffic across all devices, Cyber Monday actually exceeded Black Friday by 13 percent. Traffic on this day was 4.3 times higher than the previous six Mondays, and retailers experienced 4.7 times more conversions than in previous weeks.
While site traffic on Saturday and Sunday did not reach the exact same heights as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, these days still experienced three times the number of visitors as compared to the previous six weeks.
Customer Journey Hijacking rates climb to skim visitors – and revenues
While these figures spell great news for eCommerce businesses, the prevalence of unauthorized injected ads on consumer browsers also rose significantly on both days to skim from the increased traffic and conversions. These intrusive ads litter eCommerce websites and divert consumers during their online shopping with competitive product recommendations, pop-ups, banners and in-text redirects.
On Black Friday, 29.8 percent of all web sessions were affected by unauthorized ads.
Cyber Monday saw 31.2 percent of consumer sessions were hijacked with this activity. This reveals a marked increased from the previous weeks, where the infection rate was 21.7 percent.
The shift to mobile marches forward
Consumers are increasingly tapping into the convenience of their mobile devices year after year. In 2017, smartphones accounted for 55 percent of all eCommerce traffic on Black Friday, and 48 percent on Cyber Monday.
How well did this traffic convert into sales? 36 percent and 31 percent of all sales came from mobile devices on Black Friday and Cyber Monday respectively.
Peak traffic and conversion times
For both days, when were people shopping and buying the most?
Black Friday:
- The peak browsing hours took place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (EST)
- The most online purchases were made at 8 p.m. (EST)
Cyber Monday:
- Peak site traffic occurred between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. (EST)
- The most online purchases were made at 9 p.m. (EST)
Namogoo issued a full press release on December 4, 2017 with these stats and more.
Looking for our 2018 insights? Read our Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018 consumer data findings.
