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Black Friday 2017: a network's perspective

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  • 2 minute read

Black Friday is well established in the retail calendar as a critical trading day across the world. 2017 was no exception.

With each year that passes so our understanding of the day and wider Cyber Weekend develops. With that in mind, what did we learn this year from the thousands of publishers and advertisers running affiliate programmes on Awin’s network?

There is no doubt that 2017 was a record-breaking year. As the dust settled on the retailing juggernaut and the numbers were collated, crunched and verified, Awin was able to confirm the largest trading day in the network’s history.

Combined with the subsequent weekend, and bookended by Cyber Monday’s revenue, the four-day spending spree resulted in affiliates generating well over €400m in revenue for the 6,000 advertisers across Awin’s networks including affilinet and ShareASale.

Black Friday continued to outstrip the rest of this particular promotional period, with revenue up 27% compared to Cyber Monday with a 17% hike, in isolation an impressive number but indicative of the general flow of traffic

But there are some initial signs that perhaps we’re reaching ‘peak Black Friday’ as brands fight for attention in a fiercely competitive marketplace. 2017 saw what has become known as ‘retailer creep’ with more and more offers launching prior to Black Friday itself. This was identified in 2016 with many promotions hitting sites on the preceding Thursday.

2017 has seen this phenomenon commence even earlier with some Black Friday offers launching at least one week in advance. Not only is this pushing peak trading ever earlier (2016 was the first year Awin recorded more revenue in November than December), but it is also smoothing out the impact of a 24-hour sales window and shopper imperative to purchase within this narrow timeframe.

Ecommerce trends tend to develop rapidly and retail events are fuelling many of these changes. It was only a few years ago that general advertiser attention around Christmas was focused on the first Monday of December. In 2017 this was an ‘ordinary’ day’s December trading.

As the landscape changes so keeping ahead of the latest trends and advancements becomes critically important. In this document we aim to shine a light on this year’s numbers, provide granular insight from the individual markets as well as some specific client examples.