Ok, I’m a geek at heart and love charts and graphs that actually represent data in a meaningful way. I’m going to let you in on a couple of little secrets here using a graph I pulled up from Alexa.com:
This graph represents the “Daily Reach” of Amazon and Ebay, as a function of the percentage of unique Internet users who visit those sites on a given day. So in the chart above, on any given day approx 2% of people online visit Amazon and 2.5% visit Ebay. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but were talking 2% out of hundreds of millions of people here.
Class, what does this graph tell us? A bunch of different things, all of them of extraordinary value to an Affiliate Marketer.
- There is a large spike around Black Friday (The shopping day after Thanksgiving) for Amazon both in 2007 and 2008, but not so much for eBay. People apparently holiday shop for new items from trusted retailer more than they do on eBay.
- That month long spike around Mid-May to Mid-June 2008 on both eBay and Amazon is when taxpayers in the US received their Stimulus Tax Refund checks. Why is this significant? Because the spike is almost as large as that seen around the December holiday shopping season. People went shopping online to spend their extra money during that time
- We are in a recession. Note the steady decline in shopping traffic from Jan 2008 to now. People just aren’t shopping online as much as they did a year ago. There is a spike on Black Friday in 2008, but it’s peak is lower than in 2007.
- Online shopping traffic is cyclical each week, which is why there are so many bumps in the graph. Traffic peaks on Monday and then drops off until it bottoms out on Friday/Saturday, then begins to climb again.
- There is a mini spike on the days after Christmas as people look for post-Christmas sales and go to spend gift certificates.
What is the value in this information? That’s up to you to figure out. But I’ve adjusted my Affiliate Marketing plans based on what I’ve learned from looking at this data, and I’ve made more money because of it.
Enjoy!
