Thanksgiving Overtook Cyber Monday As Biggest Day For Visits To Retail Sites

This article is part of Marketing Land’s Holiday Retailer series.

Thanksgiving has quickly become a juggernaut for retailers online. New data from Hitwise, a division of Connexity, shows Thanksgiving overtook Cyber Monday to become the biggest day of the holiday season for consumer visits.

US consumers made 328.7 visits to Hitwise Retail 500 sites on Thanksgiving Day, coming in ahead of Black Friday with 328.5 million visits and Cyber Monday, which slipped from first to the third for the first time.

While Mondays remained important throughout the holiday season, Hitwise says, visits on Wednesdays and Thursdays were consistently about 95 percent of Monday levels each week after Thanksgiving in 2015.

In November and December, the top retail sites in the Hitwise Retail 500 drew in a record 11.5 billion visits, up 25 percent from the 9.2 billion visits that Hitwise measured last year.

Over One-Third Of  Visits To The Top Retail Site Went To Amazon

The biggest beneficiary of the boost in online retail visits this past holiday season, by far, was Amazon. It won’t come as a surprise that Amazon was the most-visited retail site, but the extent to which it continues to dominate over the rest of the retail web is significant.

The retail giant accounted for 34.5 percent of visits to the top 15 sites in the Hitwise Retail 500 in December, up from a visit share of 26.2 percent during the same period in 2014.

The good news for the other sites on this list is that most still saw overall visits increase year-over-year. Walmart, for one, attracted 13.8 million more visits in December 2015 than the previous year, yet its visit share fell from 7 to 6 percent in 2015.

Hitwise has a global ISP-level sample of 25 million consumers. Connexity acquired the online insights provider in December.