2024
Retail Peak Season
Digital Experience Benchmarks

Search brings in traffic 

Competitive pressure is high during peak season, with brands simultaneously offering discounts and fighting for visitor attention.

In 2023, search and direct sources drove the most traffic globally, with over 50% of all visits coming from paid or organic search and 22% from direct channels. (Spoiler alert: Paid search was also the second highest converting channel). 

Customers are clearly looking to cut through the noise and have become more intentional about finding the best deals. As such, retailers should ramp up their SEO and SEM efforts ahead of peak season.

Smaller screens, shallower sessions

The reality across retail peak season is that most visitors view fewer pages on mobile.

Bridging from consideration to conversion on smaller screens must be done in the space of only a few pages. 

To avoid overwhelming mobile users with too much information, retailers can use text tooltips across their journey to share key information about peak season return policies, warranties and delivery times.

Mobile converts lower than desktop (but has one trick up its sleeve)

Despite mobile bringing in the majority of traffic, that traffic converts at a lower rate than desktop traffic.

For all the conversion challenges that mobile faces, it has a major strength that can be exploited to drive conversion: Mobile wallets and quick purchase checkout options.”

So, if you’re looking to boost conversion during peak season 2024, ask yourself—where’s your visitor’s wallet?

The case for returning visitors

Although the majority of traffic (52%) is new visitors, returning visitors grab the spotlight when it comes to conversion.

The conversion rate of returning visitors was +43.2% higher than for new visitors in 2023.

This trend was apparent across countries, with one outlier, Germany, where new visitors were most likely to reward sites with conversion.

One way retailers can improve conversion rates—especially when it comes to serving new visitors—is by simply making it easier for them to find offers by adding them to the site’s search filter function.

Social struggles to convert 

Not only do paid and organic social lag behind on traffic, but they’re the lowest converting marketing channels—barely hitting a 1% conversion rate.

On the other hand, the highest-trafficked channel—paid search—had one of the highest conversion rates globally at 2.48%. 

Peak season may be a competitive time to invest in paid search, but the reward is likely to outweigh the expense.

The highest-bounce award goes to… Social!

Bounces are an unfortunate outcome for sites across all countries. 

And the channels most likely to cause bounces are social (paid and organic) with display, ads and retargeting coming in close second. This makes for plenty of wasted spend. 

But retailers should look further than simply where a shopper came from. Layering in relevant content based on visitor type (new vs. returning), interests (what product category did they click or tap) and discount propensity (is displaying a promotion doing more harm than good to the visit?) will help to deliver a truly personalized experience during peak season.

Retail sites are falling short of Google’s targets 

Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) provide an objective set of performance standards for sites—and far too many are still failing to meet the mark for both Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

Concerningly, 68.9% of all sites are also failing to measure up to Google’s recently-introduced CWV, Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

Ahead of the busiest and the most stressful retail season, businesses must take steps to optimize site performance and in particular CWV metrics.

Black Friday still drives higher conversions across channels 

Although each marketing channel’s conversion rate decreased YoY, Black Friday weekend 2023 saw an uptick in conversions compared to the weekend before.

Running promotions on paid search during the long discount weekend has the potential to deliver over +34% higher conversion rates.

To ensure they stand out and make the most of every single click, retailers can benefit from adjusting and fine-tuning Google search ads.

Shoppers convert on larger screens

In 2023, conversion rate on Black Friday weekend grew by a whopping +47.9% compared to the weekend before but saw an incremental decrease YoY.

Despite many retailers taking a mobile-first approach in the last few years, shoppers convert more on desktop than on mobile devices.

To combat this, retailers should focus on optimizing their mobile checkout experience and provide quick purchase options on Black Friday weekend.

Desktop brings bigger average order value

Retailers saw bigger average order value (AOV) during Black Friday weekend in 2023, compared to 2022. AOV also increased on both mobile and desktop devices and by +7.7% YoY overall.

And not only does desktop convert more, but it also drives order values up. In 2023, desktop AOV was +40.2% higher than on mobile.

Retailers can increase mobile AOV by providing recommendations of similar discount items and cross-category offers, particularly on product detail pages (PDPs). This makes it easy for users to find items on offer that might complement each other.