Dive Brief:
- Click-through and ad engagement rates jumped 154% and 111%, respectively, during the week before Thanksgiving, suggesting consumers were researching products for their holiday shopping gift list in advance of the shopping weekend, according to new data from Rakuten Marketing.
- Mobile was a key driver of research, with 46% of all page views occurring on a mobile device over the week of Thanksgiving. Mobile revenue was up 43% during the same period, indicating consumers are still researching more than they are purchasing on mobile.
- Combined online shopping revenue over Thanksgiving and Black Friday this year jumped 23% from 2016, according to Rakuten. The study found that online revenue and purchases on Thursday grew 28% and 35%, respectively, over last year, while online revenue on Friday increased 21%. Average order value grew 24% that day, though the number of purchases dipped 3%, pointing to consumers spreading their spending across more days but saving bigger ticket items for Black Friday, per the press release.
Dive Insight:
Holiday retail results from Thanksgiving week demonstrate the continued power of advertising and cross-device measurement. Insight into consumers' rapidly evolving shopping behaviors lets advertisers anticipate, prepare and execute marketing strategies during peak sales hours on peak sales days.
In-store foot traffic was lighter than usual this year, but shoppers spent close to $3 billion on Thanksgiving Day alone, according to an Adobe Analytics report. Mobile accounted for 61% of all online traffic on the holiday alone, while shoppers placed 51% more orders on smartphones than they did last year.
As more consumers skip the lines at brick-and-mortar stores and turn to online or mobile shopping, marketers must address this trend and enhance their website and app capabilities to reduce friction often associated with lengthy online order forms and frustrating mobile purchases.
Marketers should take note of the online shopping trend, which is expected to continue to grow into Cyber Monday, and focus on strategies to re-engage consumers who visited their websites over the past week and are holding out for new discounts, per the Rakuten release.
For marketers looking ahead to the next phase of the holiday shopping season, research from Yes Lifecycle Marketing found a notably undermarketed day was Green Monday, the second Monday in December. Just 6% of marketers executed campaigns on that day, but those that did saw a 50% higher conversion rate than business-as-usual email sends. Yes Lifecycle also found that Cyber Monday emails convert about 53% more holiday shoppers than Black Friday ones, pointing to the an opportunity for marketers to leverage in future years of the annual holiday shopping frenzy.
