Online traffic to the top 500 retail sites in the US increased by 27% year-over-year on Christmas Day, details Experian Marketing Services in newly released insights. Amazon.com, the top-rated site for customer satisfaction, was easily the most-visited retail property, with almost 25 million total visits, excluding mobile traffic. Searches for tablets drove traffic to Amazon.com, Apple iTunes, and Apple.com, each of which saw an increase in total visits. That coincides with a record day in smart device activations, according to new research from Flurry, 51% of those activations being tablets.
Flurry estimates that 17.4 million smart devices (iOS and Android) were activated worldwide on Christmas Day, more than 4 times the baseline average of 4 million from the first 20 days of the month. That 17.4 million figure is also more than twice the total from 2011’s Christmas Day, which held the previous record at 6.8 million activations.
Illustrating just how popular tablets were as a holiday gift, whereas just 20% of smart device activations during the December 1-20 baseline period were tablets, on Christmas Day, that percentage rose to 51%.
App Downloads More Than Double
With all of those new devices being activated, it’s no surprise that iOS and Android application downloads hit new highs, too. This year, on Christmas Day, app downloads reached 328 million, more than twice the baseline average of 155 million for the December 1-20 period. Those 328 million downloads gave Christmas Day the record for the largest volume of any day so far.
Download volume stayed at around 20 million per hour from the late morning to the evening time, as consumers unwrapped their gifts and installed new apps.
Other Findings:
- There were more than 115.5 million visits to the top 500 retail sites on Christmas Day, per the Experian data, with Amazon.com alone representing roughly 20% of those visits.
- Searches for “gift card” variations rose 6.1% this year for the week ending December 22, 2012, compared to 2011.
About the Data: With more than 260,000 apps using Flurry Analytics, Flurry detects over 90% of all new iOS and Android devices activated each day. The company regularly triangulates its device coverage with publicly announced figures from Google and Apple.
