Several things – important to affiliates, and affiliate marketing industry as a whole — have happened in the course of the past few days, unfortunately not all good, and today I’d like to draw your attention to the following four:

1. Pennsylvania Enacts Affiliate Nexus Tax law — Late last night (on December 1, 2011) the bad news came from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue which “in a surprising move… issued a press release and memorandum… stating that an existing statute has been reinterpreted to include a definition that states out-of-state retailers have nexus (and must collect PA sales tax) if they have affiliate marketers” [more in today's post by the Performance Marketing Association].

2. Bing Bans Holiday Deals Sites — On November 30, it was reported that Bing, in its “version of the Google Panda Update”, has “completely removed some sites deemed thin from its search engine.” Ironically, among others they’ve also banned CyberMonday.com, a website owned by Shop.org which coined the very term “Cyber Monday” back in late 2005 [more in Danny Sullivan's post here]. As Tricia Meyer has rightfully summarized, this article is “eye opening for affiliates” — “especially those who rely on search engines for all their traffic.”

3. Federal Sales Tax Reform — The reform which can remove the Affiliate Nexus Tax, “potentially getting 60,000 devastated affiliate marketers back in business”, is gaining a “growing support” and “has a very good chance of passage” [more in the Performance Marketing Association's article here].

4. £1 Million Incubator for Affiliate Marketing — In the U.K. TradeDoubler has launched The Zoo Project, a unique initiative “offering £1m worth of business resources and industry mentoring to help” affiliate startups, fostering/encouraging affiliate marketing innovation [more in this article from November 30, 2011 at MyCustomer.com].

It certainly is a dynamic industry we work in… If I’ve missed a important news that belongs here, please do submit it through the “Comments” area below.

IBM Coremetrics has just added Cyber Monday 2011 data to their benchmark report I blogged about yesterday.

Here are the things that have caught my eye:

Cyber Monday 2011 — 5 Noteworthy Facts

1. Overall spending increase — Online sales were up 33% over 2010, 29.3% up over Black Friday 2011, and AOV (avergage order value) also went up from $193.24 to $198.26
2. Conversion rate — Overall conversion rate went up from 5.6% in 2010 to 5.71%, mobile seeing the best improvement (from 2.24% to 2.99%)
3. Mobile sales growth — Nearly 11% of people used a mobile device to visit e-tailers’ websites (up from some 4% last year), resulting in a nearly threefold growth in mobile sales (6.6% in 2011 vs 2.3% in 2010)
4. Social media part — While “discussions leading up to Cyber Monday increased in volume by 115% compared to 2010″, resuling in 0.93% of site traffic, only 0.56% of Cyber Monday shoppers were referred directly from social networks.
5. Facebook vs Twitter — Facebook referral traffic accounted for 0.8% of all e-tailers’ Cyber Monday traffic (up from 0.73% in 2010), while Twitter referred only 0.02% (down from 0.07% in 2010)

Important: All of the above reflects U.S. data.

To see what people have been buying (good data both for affiliates, and for merchants to review), especially in electronics — a niche that registered the highest growth – 26% over 2010 — see these lists by Larry Magid.

Make sure you also download IBM’s full 10-page Cyber Monday Report 2011 here [PDF file], which among other things also contains detailed information and 2011-vs-2010 comparisons of sales data in such categories as Apparel (one of the best in one-page bounce rates – 25.5%), Department Stores (champion in average session length – 8:18), Health and Beauty (best in conversion – 5.4%), and Home Goods (best 2011-over-2010 improvement – 68.4%, and largest AOV – $290.11).

According to the calculations of the National Retail Federation last year over 200 million consumers spent some $45 Billion on Black Friday. This year, eMarketer predicts that $47 Billion to be spent online during the holiday season in the U.S. alone. And historically, it so happens that holiday-related sales growth picks up right around the Black Friday, or the first Friday after Thanksgiving (yes, tomorrow!)

Over the past few days several interesting infographics — related to Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday Shopping — have been posted on/by various websites. Below you may find the five that have caught my digital marketer’s eye:

Black Friday & Cyber Monday
by SEO.com [source]

Consumer Fact Sheet
by Mashwork, Inc. and Hall & Partners [source]

Black Friday & Holiday Season Guide
by Skimlinks [source]

Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Hacks & Scams
by Veracode [source]

Shop Safe on Black Friday & Cyber Monday
by Identity Hawk [source]

If you feel I’ve missed an important infographic that must be mentioned here, please add a URL to it through the “Comments” area below.

Happy  Thanksgiving, and here’s to a great Christmas shopping season!!

According to a ForeSee Results‘ holiday benchmark of shopper satisfaction with online retailers (released last week), the customer satisfaction has gone down since Cyber Monday 2010 (an expected tendency with Cyber Monday shopping incentives going away), but it is higher than it was a year ago during the post-Thanksgiving week:

Additionally, online shoppers are more satisfied with 2010 holiday prices than at they were in 2009:

Regardless of obvious improvements since last year, consumer “satisfaction with price still remains far below pre-recession levels, which was as high as 75.1 the week of Thanksgiving, 2007″ [source].

It is no secret that the difficult financial climate contributes a lot to the above figures. Online merchants have to adapt or lose sales. Those that do adapt smartly, take their bite off a better-than-last-year’s pie (not too long ago comScore reported that in the US alone holiday spending is already 12% up since last year, approaching $22 billion). Are you?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner, and consumer interest (which started increasing as early as Summer this year) in both of these days and everything that’s connected with them is quickly growing.

Not sure if you know about it or not, but Google has an awesome tool for all of us who are interested in successful marketing during the holiday shopping season. It’s called ThinkHoliday:

If you’re not using it yet, I would highly recommend checking it out: both the real-time search trends shown above the fold, and the holiday shopping articles and webinars they have listed under the search trends. There’s a ton of great information there.

Last week I was reviewing the yearly stats of one of my sites, and was once again struck by how seasonal the interest in some niches can be. Here’s a very illustrative chart of that particular site’s visits:

My December 2009 Holiday Niches or How to Make Annual Salary in One Month post immediately came to mind, which I decided to tweet. It was quickly picked up by a few affiliate marketers, and retweeted instantly:

Please don’t get me wrong. I am 100% against portraying affiliate marketing as “easy money” or a get-rick-quick scheme, and this is not what I’m getting at here. The idea behind what I’m saying is actually pretty simple, yet few affiliate marketers are employing it in a quality way — by adding real value for the end consumer in putting together niche- and holiday-focused websites.

There may not be enough time to get your holiday-specific websites up and running for the 2010 Father’s Day in the US, Canada and the UK (June 20 this year), but there still is time for the Australian/New Zealand Father’s Day (September 5), and moreover there is plenty of time to put together quality (I mean real quality, and not just snatched domain names with a few quickly-thrown-in affiliate links) websites for the upcoming celebrations of Halloween (October 31), Thanksgiving (November 25) and Christmas (December 25), as well as such retail milestones as the Back-to-School season (most of August), Black Friday (November 26), and Cyber Monday (November 29). So, don’t wait!! Grab a good domain name, and stard working on it! There is real money to be earned during those specific/focused sales seasons, and you can still take your bite off that pie.

Interesting observations have been published by comScore just two days ago.

Having analyzed the U.S. online sales data during the first 48 days of the November – December in 2009 versus the same time period in 2008, they have arrived at statistics which mean that Cyber Monday is no longer the busiest day in online shopping. Here is the data:

    ------------------------------------------------------
    2009 Holiday Season To Date vs. Corresponding Days* in 2008
    ------------------------------------------------------
    Non-Travel (Retail) Spending
    ----------------------------
    Excludes Auctions and Large Corporate Purchases
    -----------------------------------------------
    Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
    -------------------------------------------
    Source: comScore, Inc.
    ----------------------
                                   Millions ($)
                                   ------------

                                       2008     2009     Percent Change
                                       ----     ----     -------
    November 1 -  December 18       $23,873  $24,757          4%
    -------------------------       -------  -------        ---
    Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 26)         $288     $318         10%
    --------------------------         ----     ----        ---
    Black Friday (Nov. 27)             $534     $595         11%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Cyber Monday (Nov. 30)             $834     $887          5%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Green Monday (Dec. 14)             $859     $854         -1%
    ----------------------             ----     ----        ---
    Tuesday, Dec. 15                   $754     $913         21%
    ----------------                   ----     ----        ---

So while the Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday both registered a good increase in sales, it is the Tuesday two weeks after the Cyber Monday that has seen the most substantial increase – from $754 mln in 2008 to $913 mln in 2009 (21% increase)!

Also the newly-christened “Green Tuesday” (December 15, 2009) turned out to be this year’s heaviest online spending day, beating Cyber Monday (November 30, 2009) with its $887 millions spent, and Green Monday (December 14, 2009) which yielded a $854 million spend this year.

When we talk about “niche” affiliates, we normally refer to marketers that focus on a product vertical.

A number of affiliates have gone beyond verticals only, and realized that there’s also an array of amazing opportunities from holiday shopping to shipping. Today I’d like to briefly look at the demand for the holiday shopping websites.

Yesterday, Shop.org’s executive director Scott Silverman tweeted:

So I decided to have a look at the CyberMonday.com‘s (owned by the National Retail Federation just as Shop.org) recent stats as shown on Alexa and Compete.com. Here’s what I see:

Wow! With an average January-September 2009 traffic of some 13,000 visitors, they have seen a jump to 95,000 in October, and a huge spike to over 2,000,000 visitors in November. December isn’t over yet, but last year they registered a twofold increase in traffic between November and December. This year (judging by the Alexa graph) it may not be quite the same way, but the idea of centering a whole website around one popular day is obviously yielding its results.

Here’s another beautiful chart where the traffic of such Black Friday related websites as BFads.net, BlackFriday.info, Black-Friday.net, theBlackFriday.com, and BlackFriday.com is compared:

Don’t you love those traffic jumps from 300-700k to 3,240,000-4,360,000 unique visitors that most of the above five websites have registered?

What other holidays have we had in the recent past? Of course, Halloween. Let’s look at the statistics of five affiliate websites that focus primarily on this holiday:

On obvious reasons I cannot disclose the exact URLs of these websites (so we’ll have to work with a legend-less chart here). But looking at the above-reflected traffic stats, assuming at least a 3% conversion, knowing that an AOV in the costumes niche is around $50, and average commission is about 10% (but affiliates like the ones above will always be on a private commission level), one can easily calculate the above affiliates’ earnings during the month of November. In the majority of the above cases, one month’s commission payout will exceed a median annual salary in the USA.

The same calculations can be made for any of the above-quoted holiday-specific websites. While some of the above “niches” may already be crowded, there’s still plenty of room in others. So, is building a website devoted just to the Mother’s Day, Halloween or Easter worth it? I’ll just leave this question in a rhetorical mode.

Who said that past the Cyber Monday week there’s not much to fish for in the pond of holiday-oriented consumers?

Yesterday Google Retail Blog has published some staggering data: as of Sunday, December 6 2009, 64% of holiday purchases are yet left to be done. Apparently, compared to the week before Thanksgiving, the percentage has dropped only 18%:

There is still much holiday shopping left to be complete, which is encouraging news for both merchants, and affiliates.

Experience shows that with aggressive marketing, merchants can easily match (or even exceed) the Cyber Monday performance of their affiliate programs. Here’s a real life example (from the DaySpring.com’s affiliate program):

As obvious from the above chart, yesterday (second peak marked by an arrow) — after the announcement of their storewide “25% off” offer — has ended up being the second best day in the year for this particular affiliate program (second only to Cyber Monday).

Merchants: Get aggressive with your consumer-oriented offers!

Affiliates: Focus on well converting and highly demanded products, and keep up the hard work!

Yesterday we were all impressed with the statistics that the Black Friday 2009 brought us, but the Cyber Monday stats that have been circulated today have clearly overshadowed the pre-Monday records. In the DaySpring.com’s affiliate program, for example, we’ve seen an utterly amazing surge of affiliate-referred sales where the Cyber Monday results exceeded those of the previous two days (the most fruitful days in the pre-Cyber Monday 2009 history of the program) combined. Also, while there is no unified name for the Tuesday that follows the Cyber Monday, it definitely deserves one. Having examined the statistics across several affiliate programs I can say that in the majority of them within less than 20 hours of this Cyber (?) Tuesday we’ve already registered better results than those seen on Black Friday.

I hope you’re enjoying the momentum at least in some capacity (be it as an affiliate marketer, a merchant, or a consumer), and here’s some more interesting data about the Cyber Monday 2009:

Online sales were up 14% above Cyber Monday 2008, says the website sales tracking firm Coremetrics, which represents 500 major retailers, including Macy’s and Nordstrom. The data were mirrored in results for sites including Buy.com, which had more orders in an hour from 1 to 2 p.m. ET than ever in its 12-year history, and eBags.com, which had a 53% increase in sales Monday [more at USAToday.com | bold font mine].

Referencing Akamai’s Net Usage Index which ongoingly traces and monitors “the world’s online retail habits”, Jennifer Van Grove of Mashable.com posted this screenshot/chart:

Jennifer continued:

…As the graph above indicates, however, traffic peaked at 7,666,119 million visitors per minute. This peak is higher than the 6.69 million visitors per minute high on Black Friday, and it appears that the trend is still on the upswing. CNN also posits also posits that “about 96.5 Americans plan to shop online Monday, up from 85 million in 2008, according to the National Retail Federation.” [bold font belongs to the post's author; the "million" after the digits should have been omitted, but it certainly adds the emphasis]

It is also interesting to note the marketing and PR coverage that Black Friday and Cyber Monday received in Social Media. As @prman summarized the Schwartz Communications report: “Black Friday crushes Cyber Monday via Social Media… but Cyber Monday does better communicating deals”.

Finally, as stated in the beginning of this post the Cyber Monday aura is still upon the e-commerce world. Twitter, for example, is chock full of tweets which go like this:  “Cyber Monday is extended the whole month of December!” or “Cyber Monday Sale is now Cyber Week Sale.” Everyone (merchants, affiliates, and consumers too) is still very much in the Cyber Monday mood, which means more sales are yet to come; definitely not of the per-day magnitude that we’ve witnessed on the Monday, but still.