Study: Mobile holiday traffic peaked Thanksgiving, hit low Cyber Monday

Cambridge, Mass. – Mobile traffic during the 2014 holiday season peaked on Thanksgiving (50% of online traffic) and hit a low point on Cyber Monday (30% of online traffic). According to the 2014 Online Holiday Shopping Trends and Traffic report from e-commerce solutions provider Akamai Technologies, Cyber Monday still proved to be the most popular shopping day of the season, with overall retail traffic peaking at almost 13 million page views per minute (V/PM).



This new high peak of page views per minute represents a 16% increase year-over-year from the 2013 holiday season record of 11.2 million page views per minute.



Other highlights from the report include:



• The Monday before Thanksgiving (Nov. 24) saw the fourth highest peak page views per minute – and a 100% year-over-year uptick in activity – suggesting that many consumers are browsing and shopping well before the usual popular shopping days.



• Most average peak browsing times shifted from 1 p.m. ET in 2013 to 9 p.m. ET in 2014. This may represent a move away from the lunchtime desktop searches to the adoption and use of smaller or more mobile screens for browsing in the evening.





In addition, Akamai saw the following retail security trends on Black Friday:



• During the 2014 holiday season, volumetric attacks decreased while application layer attacks increased.



• There was a 12% increase in the number of proxy addresses in use on Black Friday 2014, potentially pointing to more malicious attackers' attempts to hide among volumes of legitimate U.S.-based shoppers.



• Black Friday saw more than 2.5 times the normal number of Web application firewall (WAF) triggers, as measured against the 24-hour periods on the previous four Fridays.



• The most common attack vectors were cross site scripting and SQL injections.