Black Friday is fast approaching, and with the biggest day of the year (retail wise) comes an abundance of deals and offers designed to make us all do our Christmas shopping before December even hits. This year will be no different. If last year is anything to go by, there’s a good chance you’ll have your presents wrapped up by Black Friday itself.
So, what should we expect in 2017? More of the same? Or will consumers turn their backs on this hyped up “holiday”?
As with last year, this is obviously very difficult to predict. Here are five predictions as to what will happen.
Traffic
Traffic will remain similar across the whole week in terms of overall volume. What we should also expect to see is a percentage shift toward the front of the week. Last year offers went live early, in some cases ten days early. 50% of traffic during Black Friday week was sent in the Monday to Thursday period before the big day itself. We would expect to see this hit 60% next week.
Increase in mobile devices
Staying with traffic, whilst we have seen it be evenly split between desktop and mobile devices across the year, don’t be surprised to see this shift 65% to 35% in devices favour. Last year the split across the affilinet platform hit 60/40 in devices favour and we would expect to see this increase this year with the increase of mobile optimised advertisers and publishers on our network.
Orders
With traffic, usually follows orders, and we should expect to see the same patterns here. Tuesday saw the second biggest day for purchasing last year, not Cyber Monday, driving 15% of sales on the affilinet platform. Expect to see more orders at the start of the week again as more and more advertisers go big early.
Sales
Sales will increase year on year but will fall in line with last year’s 10% increase that we saw. Whilst advertisers will still come out with large discounts and offers, consumers are now fully aware that this is the time to buy, and so we don’t expect to see a large increase in sales our platform compared with last year.
Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday will still have an impact but will be in line with what we saw last year. Cyber Monday only delivered 72% of the orders that the Tuesday before Black Friday did in 2016. Whilst it still does a tremendous amount of volume, don’t expect to see any huge surprises in 2017 either given the aforementioned “Go Big Early” stance of many Advertisers.
Yet to prepare your strategy for Black Friday this week? Read our “Last Minute Tips for Surviving Black Friday for Retail Marketers”.