16:26 Energy boost tip Awin Publisher Manager Sang Bui, shared some of his favourite meals to get through a busy day such as Black Friday. He knows from experience that you have got to be creative with your food choices in order to prevent an afternoon slump and stay full of energy.
That’s why he compiled the following list:
- Speculoos Crunchy spread with a Banana
- Peanut butter sandwich with condensed milk (Make sure to drizzle it properly!)
- Fresh sausage roll from the baker topped with your favorite chili sauce.
- A bag of chocolate kruidnoten and only eat white ones so you have some diversity.
- Coca Cola Zero so you avoid consuming extra calories.
Let us know if this list has helped you to get through the day!
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14:22: Sector splits. Here's the data to late morning showing the sector split across the nertwork and the YoY variances:
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14:10: Early conclusions: So we have around ten hours to go but the data produced so far leads us to the following initial conclusions:
- Certain European markets who have proved resistent to fully embracing Black Friday have piled on the numbers in 2017. France, The Netherlands and Sweden have all witnessed significant sales' surges.
- The UK's performance has been far more muted. Possibly indicative of the UK's adoption of Black Friday earlier and very probably because of the surge of offers up to a month in advance, has resulted in single figure growth this morning. The event is still huge, so context is everything.
- Smartphones have continued to surge. While desktop remains the largest driver of sales, in the UK handsets pulled in more sales for three hours this morning. Overall smartphone sales are up by around one-third.
- The usual big brand suspects have continued to pile on the sales. From a sector perspective, clothing and accessories is the largest driver of sales, followed by health and beauty and department stores. The first two categories have seen growth in market share while department stores have dropped back.
- UK consumers appear to have been relatively indifferent at midnight, again possibly because many offers and deals were already live.
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13:57: The importance of next generation, cross-device tracking.
Having shared smartphone stats from across the network, one of the most important considerations is how sales track across devices. If you want to understand the additional impact - often on content, social and longtail blogger - then look at this sales mix for one of our major retailers:
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13:51: Black Friday chaos ensues in stores in South Africa
While mature markets like the US haven’t seen the same level of crowds in-store this year it would appear that in other regions, where Black Friday has only recently been adopted, chaos is still something of a characteristic for the event and retailers have struggled to cope. These videos from South Africa are just one example…
13:33: Smartphone stats around the world: One of the most interesting insights to consider across Black Friday is which devices drive sales in different markets. Here we present nine markets with desktop, smartphone and tablet splits to 11am this morning:
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12:28: Top three performing advertiser programmes so far...
LookFantastic, Currys and Tesco are leading the way as far as sales are concerned across the network this year. Will these three manage to retain the top positions by the end of the day?
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11:40: Top three global markets so far revealed...
Looking at Awin's global markets so far today, the top three markets for Black Friday sales growth year-on-year have been Sweden (+70%), France (+42%), Benelux (+39%).
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10:25: First global numbers from across Awin network arrive...
The first overall numbers for the day are in and we're seeing positive year-on-year growth. We'll bring you some more granular detail over the next couple of hours but the first data is showing sales up just shy of 20% across the whole network.
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10:03: Mature markets show interesting differences
One of the interesting comparisons is between mature digital markets. Taking a fashion brand who run a series of programmes across Europe we assessed the percentage of sales tracking through smartphones. As you can see all markets are driving significant volumes of handset sales with the UK tracking two-thirds through smartphones and The Netherlands almost 50%:
09:45: Some of the most interesting stats that emerge in the first few hours of the day are around mobile as people search at midnight from their smartphones and on the way to work in the morning. Factoring in certain advertisers, such as fast fashion brands including Missguided and Boohoo, whose natural demographic is mobile first, and a powerful smartphone story emerges.
Looking at one of our key fast fashion brands we can see that 64% of their sales so far today are tracking through handsets, dwarfing desktop at just 23%.
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09:20: Smartphone sales up across the globe
Our first global stats of the day show that smartphones are trending up 30% in sales, as they continue their march to overtake desktop transactions. That's highly unlikely this year but we will be keeping an eye on some specific smartphone skewed advertisers to see where the mobile hotspots are.
