Performance Marketing Results from Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Data is still coming in, however based on shopping activity and comScore reporting we estimate that 3-5% of US ecommerce purchasing during the Thanksgiving-Cyber Monday period will have passed through Ebates Inc.’s family of sites.

FreeShipping.com is a subscription online shopping portal partnered with over 1,000 retailers that provides consumers with consistent 10% cash back on all purchases, free shipping, free return shipping, and 90-day price protection. In analyzing our YOY member shopping data, we can share the below data points:

– 2014 Black Friday Weekend spending was up 193% YOY
– Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Kohl’s and QVC rounded out the top 4 merchants for overall spend
– YOY total clicks were up 130%
– Total November clicks were up 77% as compared to the same time last year
– 5/6 top product searches on FreeShipping.com were electronics
– Most popular window of time for purchases made was from 5 – 11 pm with largest segment purchasing at 11 pm on Black Friday

All Inclusive Marketing, (www.allinclusivemarketing.com), had a very successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our affiliate programs saw big increases in overall revenue on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year compared to 2014. On Black Friday, we saw an overall increase of 141% revenue growth year over year combined for all of our affiliate clients. On Cyber Monday, we saw an overall increase of 100% revenue growth year over year for all of our combined affiliate clients. As far as traffic, we saw an increase in over clicks by 36% year over year on Cyber Monday.

For Black Friday, the VigLink Platform saw the following activity trends between Desktop and Smartphone devices:

Black Friday YoY – Overall percentage of clicks seen from publisher commercial links (links pointing to a brand or merchant site)

2013 – 66% Desktop / 10% Smartphone
2014 – 52% Desktop / 24% Smartphone

There still exists quite a large gap between the percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices, vs. the transactional volume that the traffic represents. This represents an opportunity for Retailers to greatly improve on their mobile shopping experiences and see immediate gains. For example, Cyber Monday 2014 saw 25-30% of traffic coming from mobile devices (including phones and tablets) but that traffic only generated 15-18% of total transactions. That’s a significant gap that I believe represents the challenges still facing consumers on their way through a checkout process on mobile devices. Mobile traffic continues to grow in importance, with an increase of around 50% which makes this gap even more critical for Retailers to close.