Is There a Point to Black Friday Sales?

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have passed, we wanted to see if there was an effect from this shopping holiday by analysing some of our data and looking out for any valuable changes to the statistics. The data that we based this research on came from 11 eCommerce websites built in KhooSeller. Over the years, we have beeing using PIWIK to record the page views of these sites.

Going from our PIWIK statistics, we looked into the page views for some dates in 2015 over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday holiday period and some other dates where nothing special was happening so that we could make a comparison. We then got some newer and more current data by doing the same thing for 2016. We also thought that an average daily page view for each of the years would make a good benchmark figure.

Generating page views over Black Friday weekend requires advertising. Email campaigns including details of the sales and mentioning it on Social Media channels will encourage a variety of new, and returning customers interested in visiting/potentially buying from your eCommerce website. 

Yes, we have statistics to back this up! As an example, Dragons of Walton Street is just one of the websites that we got statistics for. Running up to and on Black Friday, they didn't undertake any specific marketing, and they got fewer page views than usual.

Understanding the importance of advertising the sales, Keith Brymer Jones managed to push his page views up by 566 over the Black Friday holiday weekend. 

On Black Friday, Keith Brymer Jones had 802 page views on his website. This is a significant increase from the day before where he had 266 page views and his daily average for 2016 (200 page views). The marketing that Keith used was a 15% off voucher code that he advertised on email campaigns on the days leading up to Black Friday and on Social Media. Woodburners had 200 page views on Black Friday