Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2021 outdoor industry traffic report
Uncertainty, in several forms, has driven down traffic across the market, however, conversion rate remains a bright spot. Brands across the outdoor industry saw large traffic misses over the Black Friday & Cyber Monday period, with gaps in traffic compared to both 2020 and 2019. That said, conversion rate tracked quite closely, coming in nearly flat to last year, and continuing the huge beats to 2019. Macro factors like economic and inflation concerns, supply chain issues, lack of holiday deals, and resurgent COVID cases are still the main driving factors of this uncertainty. How can you tune up your brand and business to deal with these market conditions? We’ll break down our recommendations by traffic channel below.
Key Stats:
Black Friday traffic down 31% to 2020, 21% to 2019
Cyber Monday traffic down 21% to 2020, 19% to 2019
Traffic November 21 through December 6th down 40% to 2020, 25% to 2019
Conversion rate 11/21-12/6 was only down -4% to 2020, and was up a huge 55% to 2019
outdoor industry web traffic 2021 vs 2020
year to date traffic
conversion rate
what can you do?
With strong conversion rates across the industry, we can turn our focus to eeking out the most traffic possible from each traffic source. This doesn’t mean reinventing your programs, but instead, getting back to the basics.
paid channels - search & media
When brands see gaps in traffic, they often turn to paid channels - they’re the strongest and most immediate lever that you can pull. Our data suggest that this is precisely what is happening, with paid search and social growing their proportion of traffic. More spend across the industry also means more competition and higher costs. In order to make the most of your paid channels, dig deep to make sure that you’re optimizing your results. This means things like making sure that you’re focused on product that is in stock and ready to ship, and evaluating your performance on different platforms, and allocating budget accordingly.
organic search & SEO
Conversely, organic search can be one of the slowest moving channels, with optimizations sometimes taking months to pay off with traffic. This doesn’t mean that it should be ignored when looking to turn up your traffic though. Look for quick wins on the basics, optimizing title tags and keeping your site clean from errors. This is also a great time to look at areas in organic search where you are already performing well. Check out your high-ranking pages - can you tune up the title tags and meta descriptions to increase clickthrough rates? Tactics like these will help you to leverage your existing rankings to convert more searchers into customers.
If you have questions or want to implement these SEO strategies, email Matt.
Email marketing is all about balance. Lists can get fatigued quickly during the holiday shopping season, and brands are rightfully cautious about sending too many emails. Don’t let this hold you back though, let the data tell you! Turn up your sending volume until you see signs of dipping performance like declining open rates and more unsubscribes. You don’t want to lower the long-term value of your email file, but it's worth finding the point of diminishing returns. Additionally, this could be a great time to try out new channels like SMS - you may already have this capability if you use an email provider like our favorite, Klaviyo.
retail
Looking to retailers can also be a great piece of your strategy, working to compliment direct-to-consumer sales. Think about how you can support your key retailers. These macro and market-level headwinds are likely affecting them as well, so get creative as you explore ideas to drive business. Can you make new coop investments to increase retail visibility? Maybe think even further out of the box to design new campaigns and partnerships, such as offsetting the cost of a buy-now-pay-later campaign. These tactics can help to drive new business both in retail and direct.
media relations & PR
While it has a longer lead time, PR & media relations shouldn’t be ignored. As you look back over the quarter and year, this is a good time to plan your launches for 2022 with your media relations teams. We recommend revisiting 2021 plans and commitments, this includes internally and externally. The more your brand can integrate all your channels in 2022 the more reach and exposure your brand achieves when everything is working in sync. To this end - you can realize wins from your PR in the short term by featuring your coverage on other channels. Finally, we’d be remiss to mention looking at your DEI initiatives and promises and work towards those goals by truly integrating those programs into your day-to-day activities.
takeaways
Traffic across the outdoor industry is trending down as 2021 comes to a close, so know that you may not be the only one seeing red on your reports. After the boom of outdoor participation and spending last year it is difficult to comp traffic and sales, especially when there is ongoing uncertainty. Plus, we’re seeing retail spending as a whole changing - people are going back to spending more on things like restaurants and entertainment, likely shifting spending away from things like outdoor gear.
Conversion rates, however, remain very strong. This means that it is time to be proactive. Step back and look at the context, and go back to audit each web channel to see what you can do to optimize your traffic and sales. These changes may not turn the tide against the market factors, but they can help your brand drive the most business possible through the end of 2021 and into the New Year.