This year’s Black Friday was one of several premieres, both for the e-commerce industry and for us as an ecosystem. By this we mean the 2Performant community of affiliates and advertisers.

Many predictions have been made about the shopping event of the year, one of which is that sales would be affected by the pandemic, in the sense that new shoppers would turn to the online environment and that consumer habits would change once people embraced working from home and reacted to economic worries.

The affiliates have correctly anticipated the trends and have made more money than on last year’s Black Friday.

Of course, this would not have happened if the advertisers had not come up with good deals, which converted very well.

We were very attentive to everything that happened and we reacted in real time. The initial plan was to start communicating the statistical data on Thursday night, but we adapted to what was happening on the platform so we started on Wednesday at 16.00, in tandem with the acceleration of sales (you will see below a comparison by day according to all indicators).

We make a brief recap of the public actions we took both before and during the Black Friday week and which contributed to the success of the event:

• We announced the Black Friday Mountain Expedition challenge on October 26, a contest for affiliates with prizes of EUR 9,600, which was joined by many partners. By the way, the challenge is active until November 30.
• We organized ZOOM TO BLACK FRIDAY, a series of meetings between advertisers and affiliates in which you had the opportunity to meet each other and talk to each other, both publicly and privately (we created private discussion rooms with the possibility of selecting conversation partners).
• We couldn’t see each other physically, as we did last year at 2Performant Talks, but long live the high speed internet and ZOOM technology that allowed us to simulate pretty well even the networking breaks 🙂

October 29^th recording (in Romanian)

November 5^th recording (in Romanian)

November 10^th recording (in Romanian)

With us we had representatives from: neakaisa.ro | mondris.ro | bestvalue.eu | librex.ro | aranjareamesei.ro | libhumanitas | sosetaria.ro | fashionday.ro | vivre.ro | sportvision.ro | floridelux.ro | hervis.ro | esteto.ro | aronia-charlottenburg.ro

Note: to view the recordings you must be a member of the 2Performant “First Steps in Affiliate Marketing” Group.

• We launched our Telegram channel, specially created for Black Friday communication – we sent 33 messages in real time with the opportunities observed in the platform (EXCLUSIVE analyses). The channel remains open, so you can subscribe at any time: http://bit.ly/2Ptelegram

• We sent separate analyses via newsletter – Subscribe here if you haven’t already
• We quickly organized on Saturday night, taking advantage of the increases in traffic and sales and the fact that some advertisers still had active Black Friday offers and we called the representatives of answear.ro, carturesti.ro, otter.ro, vivre.ro, litera.ro, esteto.ro for our Black Friday Talks, a LIVE event on the First Steps group in which each advertiser told us about their Black Friday stores’ experiences, offering some tips to keep the growth trend going till the end of the weekend.

All this, coupled with our collective desire to take full advantage of this year’s opportunities, has led to the results below.

Macro figures Monday-Sunday (9-15 Nov):

• Value of commissions: 242K EUR // 1,178,441 LEI (15% increase compared to 2019)
• Sales value: 4.35M EUR VAT included // 21,193,775 LEI VAT included (12% increase compared to 2019)
• Number of sales: 63.6K (an increase of 14.2% compared to 2019)
• Number of clicks: 2.87M (5.8% increase compared to 2019)
• Conversion rate: 2.29% (12% increase compared to 2019)
• Average order value (AOV): 68.4 EUR VAT included // 333 LEI VAT included
• On average, for every euro invested, advertisers earned 15.1 EURO + VAT and paid 0.084 EUR per click.

This year, several top advertisers started Black Friday earlier (some even on Monday), which slightly changed last year’s traffic and sales patterns.

This year’s biggest surprise was Wednesday, when thanks to the launch of Black Friday offers by some of the biggest 2Performant advertisers there was a spectacular increase compared to 2019 on all important indicators (number and value sales, commission value, and conversion rate).

The weekend days were another surprise, as they saw much higher increases than those typical Black Friday weekend days when we traditionally saw increases. On Sunday, the number of sales increased by 43% compared to 2019’s Black Friday, while the value of commissions increased by 29%.

Here are the rankings we sent to you on Telegram and through our newsletter throughout Black Friday, now centralized for the November 9-15, 2020 week:

This year’s most profitable categories for affiliates were “Fashion”, “Books, Movies & Music”, and “Home & Garden”, these making up the top 3 for all affiliate profitability indicators: the value of commissions, the gain per 100 clicks and the conversion rate.

New trends by category

• Fashion – traffic and sales value decreased, but the AOV increased by 15.4%, a sign that Romanians’ interest in quality and/or niche clothing has increased.
• Beauty increased both in terms of the number of sales (92.7% increase) and in terms of sales value (a 90.7% increase). The category champion is BestValue, although it only  had a Black Friday campaign on Friday.
• Home & Garden – increased sales value (35.3% increase) and increased AOV (+24.8%). We expected this category to grow amid the pandemic and as a result of WFH (working from home).

The traffic on Thursday night was higher than on Friday night!

Traffic started to increase on Thursday from 20.00 and reached its peak at 24.00. The next peak of traffic was registered on Friday at 19.00, but with fewer clicks than on Thursday evening.

Most shopping: Friday morning and Friday evening. Sunday evening, more shopping per hour than the rest of Black Friday days (excluding Friday)

Friday morning, between 9 and 10, the most purchases/hour for this year were made, with another comparable peak being Friday between 23:00 and 24:00, in terms of the number of sales.

Friday dominated the top of hourly sales, but this year’s Sunday evening (between 20-24) was also remarkable with higher hourly sales than on the rest of the Black Friday weekend days.

Thank you for being with us and congratulations on your results!

Continued good luck with the Black Friday Mountain Expedition!