Missed Mascot Opportunity

I just received notification of a new advertiser in Commission Junction, a new shoe store named Shoebacca.com. I went to the site, hoping and expecting to see a big grinning Chewbacca pitching shoes, but no such luck. What a shame. Get it together Shoebacca.

URL Shortener and Tracker for WordPress Blogs

I learned this sweet tip from Shawn Collins at AffiliateTip.com. You can easily install the WordPress plugin “Pretty Link”, and it acts as a url shortener – and it tracks clicks, too! Here’s a Pretty Link to the plugin:

Pretty Link

Feel free to click that link as many times as you want – I want to see how well the stats work.

Thanks Shawn at Affiliate Tip!

Black Friday versus Cyber Monday

So how’s your holiday shopping going? No, I’m not talking about getting gifts for all your nieces and nephews, I’m talking about your holiday marketing efforts! Things look pretty good on my end – there really is an big uptick in online shopping so far this year. But what about Black Friday vs Cyber Monday?

Black Friday at Amazon:
Clicks: 1558
Orders: 267

Cyber Monday at Amazon:
Clicks: 860
Orders: 156

That isn’t an apples/apples comparison, as a decent percentage of my Amazon sales are through PPC. But I still didn’t realize the disparity. What about traffic?

Black Friday Traffic:
Uniques: 5413
Pages: 12215

Cyber Monday Traffic:
Uniques: 6716
Pages: 13482

Well that’s interesting, and unexpected. Cyber Monday traffic was about 25% higher, but sales were about 40% lower. I wonder what that’s about – I’ll have to do some more research on that. I could come up with some theory about on Black Friday people were ready to buy, and the deals were Black Friday only deals, so people didn’t shop around as much… But I don’t know.

What did you see on Black Friday and Cyber Monday? The same thing?