As the dust settles after another roaring Black Friday weekend, we’ve taken some time to review the 2019 winners, and share key consumer trends spotted across our network.
Across the board we’ve seen more transactions driven from a wider spread of advertisers and publishers, alluding to a more balanced portfolio. The Black Friday uplift started this year from Monday (25th November) with a spike in clicks, however sales officially started to increase from Wednesday (27th November) onwards.
Interestingly, we saw different consumer behaviours when comparing the UK and Germany, on Black Friday itself (29th November). Our German network saw large spikes of activity just after midnight, 8am and again at 11pm whereas it appeared that UK shoppers completed most of their shopping between 9am – 10pm, with peaks at 10am and 8pm.
Publisher insights
Subnetworks, CSS (Comparison Shopping Services) and Technology providers all saw strong YOY growth across our markets, with Content partners seeing a whopping 34% growth YOY. This year content really was king on our network!
We’ve seen a shift from brand-centric searches and promotions, to publishers winning from promoting specific products. This is certainly true for the Content and CSS providers and something we expect to see continue over the Christmas period.
A large proportion of sales are of course still driven by industry staple affiliates, such as Cashback and Voucher, accounting for 35.6% of all sales.
Globally, we saw 715 new publishers make a sale this Black Friday weekend, and it was positive to see some of these new partners make it into our network top 20.
Advertiser insights
This year we saw 436 new brands drive sales over this period with even more activity from merchants selling Electronics, which accounted for 23.53% of the transactions recorded on our network (vs. 21% in 2018). Our Gifting and Toys category also had an exceptional weekend seeing a 529% uplift in sales on 2018.