Insights from the past Black Friday to Cyber Monday Shopping Period
As a web analyst, I often prepare myself for the time it takes to discover new insights. I have my method – A process of going through Google Analytcs data for our clients to discover what’s working and what’s not. It normally give myself a good amount of time to go through the data. It’s a thorough and detailed process that I’ve found produces the best results, and one I’ve grown to enjoy over the years. But time is something not in abundance between Black Friday and the final shipping day before Christmas. Our team needs to find insights and provide actionable recommendations as fast as humanly possible to maximize the number of days these changes are live before the last shipping day of the season.
Mobile has been a priority of ours for several years now. But this Holiday season was the largest year-over-year mobile increase we’ve ever seen. More importantly, it’s the year people were trying to actually make purchases via their mobile devices.
The example shown above is from one of our consumer tech clients. They’re certainly more technical than the average buyer, but we saw large increases for all of our clients. The data above shows the increase an overall drop in sessions of 5.8%. But a closer look shows a year-over-year increase of more than 17% increase via mobile and a 23% drop in desktop. This example is from a travel website focusing on millennials. Sure, they’re on their phones. I get it. But what about seniors? We see increases in the 65+ demographic as well. It’s not as dramatic, but still a consistent sign that mobile traffic is leading the charge from a traffic standpoint.
Mobile visitation increased for this 65+ demographic client from 28% to 39% of sessions. This was one of the smaller increases we witnessed from our clients.
Well, for starters it means that your site better perform well on a mobile device or you’ll risk losing online revenue. Have you performed mobile usability testing? If not, have you tested the mobile shopping experience yourself or had friends and team members test it for you?
Mobile has quickly become the dominant play. Are you ready?
Check out our next blog post on the topic – “How to Quickly Maximize Mobile.”
