This year, Black Friday began on Thursday, November 23, with retailers launching their offers and special proposals at 4:00pm GMT. A number of e-merchants opened the clearance sales even earlier (some of them starting the operation on November 20) and continued these until December 1.
admitad, a major international ad network, has reviewed its in-house data related to these sales from Nov. 23 and to Nov. 27. Here are the main findings from admitad’s report:
- The generated revenue, if judging by the activity of the merchants launching and promoting a partnership program through the admitad network, grew two-fold from the past year’s Black Friday, from some from $22 million to $43 million
- This evolution was due, to a large extent, to a sharp increase in the volume of purchases recorded by admitad. (Purchase means completed order, regardless of the number of items in the basket.) During this year’s Black Friday, the admitad network generated some 1.3 million orders, up from 919,000 in 2016.
- Reflecting this trend, the volume of publishers’ commission fees also increased substantially, from $1,6 million to $2,6 million.
- The most used sales procedures were promocodes 25%, cashback 21% and XML-feeds 16%.
- Most orders were made from desktops (80%), next are Android (11%) and iOS (3%).
Number of Black Friday orders generated by the admitad affiliate network
Commission fee volume received by admitad’s affiliates during Black Friday sales days
in US dollars
Illustrating these trends, some e-merchants provided this feedback:
- Adidas / Reebok: “Black Friday 2017 went smooth, according to plan. We were pleasantly surprised with the performance of cashback webmasters, while we recorded moderate performance with targeted traffic sites. We will definitely participate in Black Friday 2018 after some adaptations.”
- MediaMarkt: “According to our site stats, on November 23 traffic exceeded the level of November 16 by 150%, and sales grew threefold compared to the previous Friday. As a result of the campaign, from November 23 to 27, the top five most popular products included PlayStation, TVs, games, washing machines and microwave ovens. This year, online shoppers’s favorite purchase was the Playstation model 4 Slim 500GB with three games and the additional gamepad included.”
- Russian e-merchant Mvideo: “During Black Friday, we offered up to 80% discounts on all categories, with the same discount offered online and offline. The campaign involved about 600 types of items. The most popular items were gaming consoles and games themselves, smartphones, TVs, vacuum cleaners and small home appliances. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, our online store saw its traffic grow almost twice compared with usual days in October. The number of online purchases increased by 2.5 times with the conversion rate increasing by 25%. Online traffic grew 25% y-o-y, the number of transactions more than doubled.”
This post is part of a special series on CPA advertising across emerging markets in partnership with admitad.
