Yes, Virginia, There Was a Cyber Monday: OneUpWeb

Web retail traffic, conversions and sales started building in the last week of October 2006 and did not start declining to pre-holiday levels until the week of Dec. 18. Even then, sales and conversions remained high, although traffic dropped back to pre-holiday levels.

And the “Cyber Monday” effect? It was real.

Those are some of the findings from a report, “2006 Online Holiday Buying Trends”, compiled by interactive marketing agency OneUpWeb and released yesterday. The study tracked search analytics data from paid search ad campaigns a mix of online retailers and more than one million unique consumers for the period from Sept. 25 2006 through Dec. 31. The data was aggregated and sorted into traffic, conversion rates and total sales. OneUpWeb then calculated changes in those three categories relative to the base week of Sept. 25 through Oct. 1, 2006.

The study found that all three categories began rising together during the week ending Oct. 29, when traffic increased 14.2%, conversion rates rose 15.7% and total sales increased 9.8%.

Those three categories then kept rising through the week ending Dec. 17, allowing for a brief falloff in traffic and conversions during Thanksgiving week. The OneUpWeb report speculates that time-pressed consumers might have depressed traffic volumes that week, while online research for bricks-and-mortar shopping might have held conversions down. Nevertheless, online sales for the week still grew 12.7% from the week before.

The three weeks after Thanksgiving saw the highest sustained gains in all three categories. During the week after Thanksgiving, traffic rose 35.6% over the previous week, conversions rose 28.7% and total sales 63.1%.

For the week of Dec. 4, traffic volume was 81% higher than the Sept. base week, conversions were up 94.2% and total sales up 198.6%. And for the week of Dec. 11, as the Christmas holiday neared, OneUpWeb found that online retail traffic was still up 79.8% over the base, conversions up 72.3% and sales up 193.2%.

In the week of Dec. 18, traffic growth fell off sharply — only 11.1% above the base — and growth in total sales declined too, to 36.6% above base. But conversions for the week still remained 54.1% higher than the base week, indicating that the last-minute shoppers who did go online were still much more willing than average to take actions.

OneUpWeb found that Dec. 11 to Dec. 13 was the season’s most active growth period for all three measures, traffic, conversions and total sales. And while some industry reports cast doubt on the significance of Cyber Monday, the first weekday after Thanksgiving, it proved to be an e-commerce reality this year, with total online sales growth almost double that of the Friday after Thanksgiving, and high traffic and conversion growth to boot.

Online retailers can put this historical data to work next holiday season, OneUpWeb concludes, by testing their holiday ad creative as early as the back-to-school season, in order to have holiday promotions and offers optimized and ready by Halloween. They can also plan to offset sales declines in the week before Christmas by promoting gift cards.

As for predicting next season’s holiday volume increases, OneUpWeb recommends two rules of thumb. Whatever volume a site gets during Halloween week, retailers should plan to handle four times that much traffic during the holiday peak periods. They should also prepare to handle twice the traffic they get during the two weeks prior to Thanksgiving.