Earlier today IBM Coremetrics published their Black Friday 2011 benchmark report (thanks to Bryan Eisenberg for tweeting about it), and while there has been an impressive 24.3% increase in overall online sales over last year’s figures, it is the mobile channel that has shown the most impressive to me growth.
Here are the details:
Black Friday 2011 — 7 Pieces of Mobile Statistics
- Traffic — increased to 14.3% compared to 5.6% in 2010
- Sales — surged to 9.8% from 3.2% year over year
- Devices — iPhone and iPad ranked #1 and #2 mobile devices used for online shopping (5.4% and 4.8% respectively), while Android came in third at 4.1%
- Apple Shoppers — those using iPhone and iPad accounted for 10.2% of all online retail traffic on Black Friday 2011
- Bounce Rate — mobile shoppers demonstrated a laser focus that surpassed that of other online shoppers with a 41.3% bounce rate on mobile devices versus online shopping rates of 33.1%
- Time on Site — interestingly, regardless of the significant conversion rate improvement, the average session length remained around 4 min mark (4:03 in 2011 vs 3:57 in 2010)
- Conversion Rate — there was a 32.51% increase in conversion rate of mobile shoppers (from 1.97% CR on Black Friday 2010 to 2.78% this year)
Immediately after seeing these, I recalled a recent MediaPost article by Jason Heller who among his “top tips for a successful digital holiday season” advised to “engage on mobile”, arguing that “with smartphones pushing close to 50% penetration, 2011 will surely see significant increases in mobile holiday commerce”. The above data already makes it clear that those who are actively utilizing the mobile channel are seeing those sales. Are you?