Report: 2016 digital holiday sales, online searches rise

While results were conservative, holiday digital sales surpassed 2015 figures.



That is one of the findings in the “2016 Holiday Season: By the Numbers” report from NetElixir. The search marketing firm aggregated holiday traffic data across more than 90 million visits among four different verticals (food and gourmet, consumer electronics, apparel and gifting), between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. The search marketing data was extracted from Adwords, Bing and Yahoo Gemini platforms, while sales data was pulled directly from the e-commerce websites.



Compared to 2015, total e-commerce holiday sales increased by 10.43%. Meanwhile, purchases on mobile devices, or m-commerce, surpassed 30% in 2016. These findings match NetElixir’s forecasted holiday e-commerce figures, which were released in September 2016.



“While we hoped for better sales figures, we are pleased that we were able to predict the holiday ecommerce sales figures so accurately,” said Udayan Bose, CEO of NetElixir. “We attributed the conservative growth figures this year to several factors like earlier than usual holiday shopping with major online events like Amazon’s Prime Day, consumers using their mobile devices to purchase yet making less expensive purchases on mobile, and to the uncertain political environment.”



When analyzing e-commerce sales data by U.S. regions, the highest increase was in the south (19.9%). The next highest was in the west (9.5%), then central U.S. (6.5%), and the northeast (5.8%), data showed.



When examining search marketing trends, the report revealed that impressions saw the biggest lift this year with an increase of 35.7%, while conversions increased by 18.63%. The average cost-per-click went up by just 1.56%, and the average order value (AOV) decreased by 5.4%.



The most popular time of day to buy was between the hours of 12 p.m. to 8 p.m., and the second most popular time during the morning hours of 6 a.m. to 12 p.m. The same time of day statistics also applied to impressions and clicks, the report said.



“The uptick in mobile activity this holiday season caused conversions and impressions to increase fairly dramatically, but caused overall AOV to decrease as people typically spend less on their mobile devices than on desktops,” continued Bose. “The time of day rates are also important findings for retailers as they plan for future digital marketing campaigns, which should be focused on the afternoon hours when consumers are showing the most engagement and intent to purchase.”