go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Guess What Percent Of Black Friday Online Sales Came From Twitter Referrals?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/black-friday-online-sales-from-twitter-referrals-2012-11

What percent of online sales on Black Friday do you think came from Twitter referrals?

How about Facebook?

While you’re pondering those questions, here are some other factoids from a report on Black Friday online sales by IBM:

• The average Black Friday online shopper bought 5.6 items per order. That’s down 13% from last year. It’s also down 40% from Friday, November 16th, a week earlier. Hard to know what to make of that.
• The average shopping “session” length was 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That’s down about 10% from last year. Compare that to the average hellish shopping session in a physical store, and you’ll see why ecommerce is continuing to grow as a percent over overall retail sales.
• The “conversion rate” of online shoppers–the percentage of those who visited the site who actually bought something–was 4.58%. That’s up 9% from last year.
• Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) accounted for 16% of sales. That’s up from 10% last year.
• Mobile devices accounted for 24% of site traffic. That’s up from 14% last year.
• iPads accounted for 10% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.
• iPhones accounted for 9% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.
• Android phones and tablets accounted for 5.5% of site traffic, up from 4% last year.

The key observations here would seem to be:

• Mobile is ! continui ng to grow rapidly as a percentage of traffic and sales, but it’s not taking over by any means.  6 years into the smartphone era, with smartphones now accounting for more than 55% of U.S. handsets, traffic to mobile sites (including traffic from tablets) is still less than 25% of overall traffic.
• Apple devices continue to crush Android devices in terms of commerce engagement. Android users just don’t seem to do all that much with their gadgets.

And now to social referrals…

It wasn’t long ago that many people were arguing that Facebook was eventually going to be bigger than Google. Word of mouth, after all, is the most powerful form of marketing known to man. And people lived on Facebook, so they would soon be shopping on Facebook. And so forth.

Well, so far, anyway, that ain’t happening.

• Only 0.68% of Black Friday online sales came from Facebook referrals–two-thirds of one percent. That was a decline of 1% from last year.

And how about Twitter?

A couple of years ago, people were excited about Twitter’s potential as a commerce platform, too.

But Twitter’s impact on ecommerce, it seems, is zero.

Not “basically zero.”

Zero.

• Commerce site traffic from Twitter accounted for exactly 0.00% of Black Friday traffic. That was down from 0.02% last year.
  

So much for the idea that Twitter or Facebook’s business models are going to have much to do with commerce.

SEE ALSO: Here’s Why You Will Instantly Dump Your Cable Company To Get Google Fiber

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