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Traffic Surges 3x on Black Friday, Driving 32 Percent More Clicks on Commerce-Related Content as Consumers Seek to Buy the Perfect Gift
[September 19, 2017]

Traffic Surges 3x on Black Friday, Driving 32 Percent More Clicks on Commerce-Related Content as Consumers Seek to Buy the Perfect Gift


Skimlinks, the leading content-to-commerce platform, today released its annual analysis of online holiday shopping behaviors, traffic, and purchases, Holiday 2017 eCommerce Report. This report uncovers purchase-intent data from the company's premium network of publishers including BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Condé Nast, The Wirecutter, and HuffPost, and reveals holiday trends publishers, merchants, and marketers can use to make decisions for the 2017 season.

This year's report finds consumers increasingly turn to commerce-related editorial content as they look for the perfect holiday gifts. Analysis of last year's traffic reveals that:

  • Black Friday (News - Alert) online traffic surges 3x from the holiday average, driving 32 percent more clicks per day for commerce-related content.
  • Publishers experience a 15 percent increase in earnings-per-click and a 23 percent increase on conversion rates for commerce-related content.
  • The majority of Black Friday content is released in November and drive 85 percent of clicks. Approximately five percent of clicks to Black Friday articles came from articles published as early as August, while ten percent of clicks coming from "evergreen" product articles published throughout the year.
  • Early October shows the first significant increase in Black Friday content with traffic doubling to an average of 11,000 clicks per day on October 9th, 2016.
  • Although mobile is becoming more important, desktop remains the driving force for purchases through affiliate links. Desktop conversions were 61 percent higher on Cyber Monday (News - Alert) and 50 percent higher on Black Friday than the holiday average.

"The holiday season continues to be the most lucrative time of year not only for retailers, but for publishers too, and savvy publishers are becoming more prepared with more deliberately created holiday content to capitalize on this trend," said Alicia Navarro, CEO and Co-founder of Skimlinks. "Top performing merchants and publishers will win by understanding how to prepare for and capture early interest, and how to also be nimble enough to leverage last-minute shoppers. That means catering for early bird shoppers in the fall months, and releasing content early enough so it has time to seed and rank in the search engines so you perform well for last-minute shoppers as holiday shopping intensifies in November and December."



For this report, Skimlinks aggregated page impressions, clicks, and commissions across Skimlinks premium network of more than 57,000 publishers on 1.5 million websites globally. The company examined traffic trends for all of 2016, the holiday season, and multiple important holiday shopping moments such as the Black Friday weekend. Skimlinks calculated various metrics and compared the performance of different dimensions such as traffic, conversion rates, and device type during the relevant shopping moments compared to the rest of the holiday season.

To view the full report from Skimlinks, Holiday 2017 eCommerce Report, please visit: http://start.skimlinks.com/reports/holiday-shopping-insights


To view the 2017 infographic from Skimlinks, Holiday and Black Friday Insights, please visit: http://start.skimlinks.com/reports/holiday-shopping-charts

About Skimlinks
Skimlinks is the leading content-to-commerce platform globally, helping publishers monetize their editorial content, and marketers find people who want to buy their products.

Skimlinks' platform creates new revenue for publishers by: automating the affiliation of commerce-related content, and syndicating the resulting shopping-intent data to marketers and merchants to help them reach consumers interested in their products or brands. This data-as-a-service - Audiences by Skimlinks - is now the largest source of shopping-intent data available to marketers for use in the platform of their choice.

Skimlinks' mission is to help publishers be rewarded for the role content plays in driving sales, and to help merchants understand what is driving those sales.

Skimlinks is used on 1.5 million websites globally by companies such as BuzzFeed, Refinery29, Condé Nast, The Wirecutter, and HuffPost. With this network, and its connection to more than 24,000 merchants, Skimlinks sees the content-to-commerce journeys of about 1.6 billion people monthly.

Learn more at www.skimlinks.com.


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