Online shoppers continue to move away from desktops and toward their mobile devices for holiday shopping. And when consumers arrive on a retailer’s website during the holiday season, a majority of them are new visitors, according to data from analytics firm Contentsquare.
“With just over half of website visitors coming in as new customers versus returning customers, this means that the peak holiday period has a massive opportunity for retailers to not only get a transaction but also win over new repeat customers,” says Aimee Stone Munsell, chief marketing officer at Contentsquare.
Mobile devices continued to dominate traffic to retailer websites, according to Contentsquare, which collected data from 314 million user sessions from Nov. 15 through Dec. 24, with a focus on apparel merchants. The firm says desktop traffic for the period fell 6% compared with the same period in 2018. Mobile traffic—from smartphones and tablets—grew by 1% and accounted for 68% of traffic during the 2019 holiday shopping period.
Traffic from tablets increased by 21% in 2019, more than for any other kind of device. However, tablet traffic still accounted for just 5% of the total traffic.
“In terms of mobile devices, the tablet is this year’s wildcard, even in the fashion industry, which is where we predict the device could play best,” Stone Munsell says. Sales made through tablets still represent a much smaller percentage of total sales than desktop or mobile, she says, “indicating that brands should invest time in optimizing a truly mobile experience.”
Consumers were keen to take advantage of promotions retailers offer during Black Friday (Nov. 29) and Cyber Monday (Dec. 2), Contentsquare says. Among its findings:
- The average conversion rate reached 4% during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The 2019 holiday shopping season as a whole (Nov. 15-Dec. 24) recorded an average retail conversion rate of 2.9%.
- During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the bounce rate on ecommerce sites was 37.5%, about 4.4% lower than the holiday period as a whole. The average bounce rate during the 2019 holiday season as a whole was 39.2%, compared with an average of 48% for the whole year. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.
- The mobile bounce rate is always higher than the desktop rate. It came in at 41% during the holiday period.
- During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the proportion of returning visitors increased by 2% compared with the season as a whole.
- The average retail shopping cart during Black Friday and Cyber Monday was $166.43, up 10.5% compared with $150.56 for the entire shopping period.
- The average number of pages viewed during the whole holiday period was 6.3 with an average session time of 7 minutes. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the average number of page views increased by 8% and the average session time was higher by 20%.
- Visitors spent 11.3% more time on each page during Black Friday and Cyber Monday than they did during the holiday period as a whole.
Online sales from Nov. 1-Dec. 24 grew 18.8% over the same period last year, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse. That’s a faster growth rate than last year when web sales grew 18.4%.
According to Adobe Analytics, U.S. shoppers spent $125.50 billion online from Nov. 1 through Dec. 19, 2019. By the time the shopping season ends on Dec. 31, Adobe expects the total to be $143.8 billion.
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