Cyber Monday Postmortem: What Your Analytics Are Telling You
The orders are shipped, the ad budgets are spent, and most store owners are already thinking about the next thing. Don't be most store owners. The week after your biggest traffic event of the year is when your analytics have the most to teach you, and the lessons expire fast as memory fades and data gets buried.
Block out two hours this week for a postmortem. Here's what to look at.
Where did buyers come from, and where did browsers come from?
Open your traffic sources and compare not just visits but revenue per channel. It's common to discover that the channel that drove the most traffic drove mediocre sales while a quieter one, often email, converted at several times the rate. That finding should directly reshape next year's budget. Look at your top landing pages the same way: which pages turned clicks into carts, and which ones took expensive ad traffic and leaked it?
Where exactly did people give up?
Pull your funnel: product page to cart, cart to checkout, checkout to purchase. High-traffic days magnify your weak points, so a step that quietly loses buyers all year will show a glaring drop-off now. If mobile conversion ran far below desktop, that's a checkout usability problem, not a mobile audience problem. Note which products were viewed heavily but rarely bought, because that usually points to pricing, photos, or missing information you can fix before the next promotion.
What did the surge do to your site?
Check page speed and uptime during your peak hours, not averages for the day. If load times ballooned when traffic spiked, you've learned your hosting ceiling the cheap way, while it merely slowed instead of crashed. Also skim your site search terms from the weekend: what shoppers typed into your search box is a plain-language list of what they wanted and, where results came up empty, what you should stock or rename.
Write the findings down, even just a one-page doc, because next October you'll be planning blind without it. And if reading funnels and speed reports isn't how you want to spend a week in December, that's what we're for. Awesome Website Guys monitors performance year-round and turns this data into fixes through our optimization program, so every season starts smarter than the last.
