The vast majority (94%) of UK Top100 retailers promoted sales on their website landing pages on Black Friday. Many of them decided to start it earlier, though, with almost half (49%) already having active deals on 22 November (Wednesday), some were calling it “Black Week” or “Early Black Friday”, and 22% had already started promotions one week before Black Friday.
There was a tendency among the seven UK Top500 Elite retailers to avoid the early promotion, with the majority initiating sales on Black Friday itself, while the majority of the entire Top100 UK retailers in other clusters had begun their promotions by Wednesday (22/11).
Table 1: Black Friday adoption by performance cluster
Elite (best 6) | Leading (next 19) | Top 50 (next 25) | Top 100 (next 50) | |
17/Nov | 17% | 39% | 16% | 20% |
22/Nov | 17% | 56% | 40% | 55% |
23/Nov | 17% | 72% | 56% | 66% |
24/Nov | 83% | 94% | 96% | 94% |
Consumer Electronics retailers were the ones that started the earliest, with 57% of Top100 retailers in the sector already advertising the event with landing page banners one week prior to the event. On Wednesday (22/11), 79% of Top100 Consumer Electronics retailers had sales banners on their landing pages. Footwear retailers were the second-most likely to have a promotion with 67%
Landing page real estate
Top100 retailers allocated, on average, 60% of the immediately visible part of their landing pages to Black Friday promotional banners and text, as measured on desktop web browsers. Footwear retailers were the ones with the largest average allocation to the event (81%), followed by Health & Cosmetics (69%).
Discounting
Two-thirds of the Top100 opted to advertise a discount fraction on their landing page promotions, with an average maximum discount of 36%. Children’s Goods retailers were the most aggressive, offering up to 60% off during the event, followed by Health & Cosmetics at 48%.