Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday: Online Conversions

Yahoo has been trying to give advice to retailers, telling them that they should not forget just how important Black Friday and Cyber Monday is. Stores are already making plans for Black Friday, which is the unofficial start of the holiday season.

Black Friday is a day that shoppers will head down to their local stores to pick up a bargain; this one day will have a huge affect on online sales conversions for that day. The strange thing is, according to marketingvox.com, Yahoo learned that stores had a better conversion on Black Friday than they did for Cyber Monday last year.

Yahoo looked at the more than 2.6 billion ad impressions from their retail clients in November 2008; they looked at the click-through rates and sales conversion for Black Friday and Cyber Monday to see just how well the retailers performed.

The reports showed that click-through rates dropped by as much as 27% compared to the rest of the month, but traffic and sales conversions online saw a huge increase. Black Friday had an increase of 147 percent compared to the rest of November; Cyber Monday only had a 73 percent increase in conversion.

This certainly contradicts a recent article that we wrote about Cyber Monday becoming the new Black Friday. However, shopping patterns have changed in year, so this could still turn out to become true.