Black Friday has quickly become the shining jewel in the retail crown. Cementing its place as the most important event of the year, Cyber Week has even surpassed Christmas when it comes to net spend and customer volume, writes Lisa Luu, innovation and insights manager, Hitwise, exclusively for RetailTechNews.

According to IMRG, over £1.2bn was spent in the UK last year on Black Friday alone, an increase of 12% year-on-year. Take into account the additional £6.5 billion collected over the entirety of Cyber Week (Monday, 21 November to Cyber Monday, 28 November), and you have a concentrated period of extreme consumer interest that retailers can capitalise on.

So far, retail brands have failed to hit the heights of 2016, when it comes to hard sales, but looking into Hitwise’s online behavioural tool, we can see the interest for Black Friday already snowballing to unprecedented levels. Below, we’ll discuss five insights that can better inform the Cyber Week digital strategies of retailers great and small

Anticipation

First up, searches for 'Black Friday' are 40% higher than they were in October of last year. Incorporate all the related searches around the term, and this figure jumps even higher to 60% (from 228,000 to 364,000 unique users). With searches around Cyber Week an indication of purchasing decisions down the line, then there’s a strong chance retailers are in for an even busier shopping period than 2016.

Conversion

Moving from audience distribution to that of time, Black Friday can be split into two distinct periods: product research and purchase incentive.

The next chart shows Black Friday research occurring earlier and earlier in the year. For example, in the lead up to Cyber Week 2016, high-tech products had a research-to-purchase lifecycle of almost three weeks. People searching for laptops mostly visited media and tech sites during this period, to get a better understanding of a specific brand or what they wanted to buy. Visits to actual e-commerce platforms, however, only peaked in the week of Black Friday itself. 

Segmenting time in this way will allow retailers to target audiences in more accurate ways, and mirror content with consumer intention. And they can now go one step further, assessing the effectiveness of specific content on an hourly basis in order to further tailor specific offerings. 

Content source

Knowing when a certain content source will achieve the greatest traction is crucial to a successful Cyber Week. One example of optimising different avenues in this way is Amazon.

Although, search remains the top traffic source for retailers over Cyber Week – peaking in the evening between 6pm and 10pm – other channels do offer distinct opportunities to drive interest at alternative hours. Amazon targeted the morning email checker, with traffic from this source peaking from 9am to 12pm in the days leading up to Black Friday. Moving beyond accepted avenues will allow retailers to increase the breadth of potential customers. The next question, therefore, is who actually are these people? 

Audience

Black Friday is traditionally seen as the retail event for the tech-savvy, younger individual; but in recent years, an older demographic has come to the fore.

Of those searching for Black Friday deals, the audience of those 55 and over has grown by 135% in October year-on-year. Although this group is still under-indexed in comparison to the overall online population, they are the ones who have bucked the 2017 trend and are increasingly engaged in Black Friday.

The over 55s also have distinct behavioural patterns that separate them from their younger counterparts, adding to the opportunities of less traditional retailers. Searches are likely to focus on specific brands rather than general searches, with the likes of Michael Kors performing particularly well within the specific age bracket.

Who wins?

Household names continue to dominate Cyber Week, with department stores accounting for 40% of all online retail traffic, but there are also opportunities for more niche players to get involved in the frenzy. In 2016, both Health & Beauty and House & Garden retailers saw their market share increase, by 18% and 14%, respectively. Specialism allows retailers to distinguish their offerings from the top players, and more accurately cater to audiences with particular products in mind.

Pairing insights with actions will allow retailers to build Black Friday offerings with the consumer in mind. From shifting audiences to hourly variations in online behaviour, Cyber Week is a developing beast which offers a variety of opportunities at different stages of the cycle.