Adobe Data Shows Black Friday Breaks Online Sales Record With $3.34 Billion

Adobe recently released an article covering Retailer Black Friday performance. Many of the insights and metrics show a very positive growth in the online retail space. This just reinforces that people are "shopping from the couch" over the Thanksgiving holiday.

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The article references data gathered from a segment of the Adobe Analytics platform customers (formerly Omniture), what it doesn't include is data from Amazon.com or the Amazon App. These two areas are a large blind spot for industry analysis, either way Adobe captured 22.6 Billion visits to retail websites, so that's a pretty good measure!

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On to the stats:

Retailers that have invested in mobile, email and social have seen 30 percent more sales on average and 25 percent higher average order values.

This is a great piece of information, it shows where users are spending their time. Having a strong social marketing plan and user engagement plan is essential to keeping users in your store. Check out what one of our customers is doing on Facebook with their #FeedYourOutside campaign.

Black Friday set a new record by surpassing the three-billion-dollar mark for the first time at $3.34 billion (21.6 percent growth YoY).

Of course online shopping is only increasing, a 21.6% YoY growth is impressive no matter how you look at it. Part of the reason for this is the maturity of technology platforms and being able to deliver the best customer experiences across devices (again - it's a mobile thing!)

Retailers saw an increase in sales coming through Shopper Helper Sites like RetailMeNot and CNET (16.5 percent share of sales), email (17.8 percent), display (1.2 percent) and social (0.9 percent). Traffic coming from search ads (38.3 percent) decreased by 4.3 percent from holiday averages while direct traffic (25.3 percent) decreased by 9.6 percent, although both remained the largest contributors to overall sales.

You would expect Display ads to be a low contributor (is this ad medium dead yet?), but the really surprising one was Social, only contributing 0.9%! We know users are spending a lot more time on social, but the commerce components are still in their infancy - it will be interesting to see where this trend goes in 2017.