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Six extra hours helped Amazon to lift Prime Day’s traffic, but its hourly rates fell: SimilarWeb

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Six extra hours helped Amazon to lift its Prime Day traffic by 5%, but its hourly rates fell by 12.6% when compared to the same time last year, according to new analysis.

While Prime Day 2018 launched for 36 hours at 3pm on Monday July 16 in comparison to the 9pm start of a 30 hour Prime Day 2017 event, this year’s Monday sale traffic was up at 15% on the same day last year due to the extra six hours of sale, according to data from SimilarWeb. The full sale day, Tuesday July 17 2018, saw less digital footfall than July 18, 2017.

Overall, Prime Day traffic was 54% above the baseline average Monday/Tuesday traffic, with more than 180m visits paid during the event. This is 5% higher than Prime Day 2018, making this year’s traffic and sales success the highest yet. On Monday, Amazon saw total traffic peak within the first few hours, with a 29% surge compared to its weekly average. It then dropped at around 8pm until the early hours of Tuesday due to the UK outage, costing the retailer an estimated £195m in lost UK sales. Over the whole of Tuesday, traffic was 45% up on the baseline.

Referral traffic into Amazon 

Amazon’s Prime Day also saw business sending traffic to its website, boosting levels of incoming referral traffic by 2.2%. The tech website cnet.com optimised its content with “prime day” related keywords by 30.2% in comparison to amazon.com’s 23.5%, which saw cnet.com getting a financial uplift by organising content over Amazon’s own sale day.

These findings are echoed in Hitwise analysis, which says that amazon.com saw one in twenty UK web visits on its first day of Prime Day 2018 sale, with 7.8% of customers purchasing after browsing, up by 10.4% from the same day last year. These figures mark 7m in sale transactions (6.94m), an uplift from 6.45m from last year.

Main image courtesy of Amazon

Graph courtesy of SimilarWeb

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