Black Friday – Where’s My Website Traffic???

Today is known as Black Friday by retailers all around the US. It is the start of the holiday shopping season and a crucial day which will forecast their holiday sales or lack of.

For website owners when their site traffic comes to nearly a standstill around the Thanksgiving holiday and literally becomes non-existent the weekend after Thanksgiving, it can be a shock. Most sites, e-commerce shopping sites excluded, will see a large traffic drop around Thanksgiving and then another one around Christmas and the week leading up to New Years. This is not unusual and we have seen this trend every year. Your website visitors are at the mall or visiting with friends. They are simply not online browsing for your services. Their focus has moved from business to family and friends.

If you have an e-commerce site, Black Friday becomes really for you more like Black Monday. A typical e-commerce store will have large traffic increases on Monday as many online shoppers are pricing all through the weekend and then will come back to the site with the lowest price or best shipping deal on Monday when they do their online buying at the lunch hour.

If you are well-priced for your products and services, you may instead see heavy buying traffic this weekend an additional spike on Monday as well. People are in the shopping mood and online businesses will benefit from this frenzy even in online stores.

Even with all the economic trouble this past several months, the stores when I have shopped have been busy. I am not sure if Black Friday will be as big as previous years based on many consumers cutting back on spending, but I for one have already done my part albeit early in plunking down my cash for electronic kid gifts even before Black Friday.

So the bottom line is, if you are a regular business owner, expect your traffic and pay per click activity to crash this next week and expect the same as we get close to Christmas and New Year, but it will build back up just after the holidays.