Google Affiliate Network Winter Holiday Retail Insights

As we head into the busy holiday shopping season our water-cooler conversations turn to prognostications about the upcoming seasonal peak. With a vast publisher network helping consumers find offers and product information, the affiliate channel is typically a very accurate reflection of ecommerce trends, particularly during peak shopping seasons. And of course the most interesting change during the holiday season, we (online marketers), really look forward to Mondays!

Cyber Monday is a widely accepted phenomenon and it's dueling with its offline counterpart, Black Friday, for attention from shoppers and advertisers. But November 30th is just the first of the exciting Mondays during the online shopping season. The most important indicator of the holiday shopping peak is the calendar. It all depends on where the holidays fall relative to shipping deadlines. Google Affiliate Network captures a summary of our advertisers shipping deadlines to help affiliate publishers with their optimization schedules. Publishers can access the shipping deadline calendar in the Google Affiliate Network user interface. Sign in and visit the announcements section on the publisher home page.

During the holiday season we see activity accelerate around the first of November and that trend continued this month. We look at four key indicators: visits, conversions, average order size and conversion rate. Visits peak first, with the spike in conversions lagging by 2-3 days. Conversion rates peak just before the average shipping deadline as last minute shoppers move into transaction mode. Average order size has proven to be a good indicator of the overall e-commerce environment, as in 2008 we saw the average order size drop pretty significantly over previous holiday seasons. The consensus at Google Affiliate Network is that we'll see the most significant spike in volume on November 30th but we anticipate the following Mondays (Dec. 7th and Dec 14th) will rival Cyber Monday in overall volume and conversion rates will peak on Monday, December 14th as the shipping deadlines loom.

Note: Data presented represents "Google Affiliate Network's Same Store Sales" to illustrate affiliate channel trends. The trend data is based only affiliate programs in place during the previous year, it does not include new advertisers and excludes certain anomalous publishers.