Black Friday 2022 – an analysis of web scraping patterns
We're just coming off an intense Black Friday season, and being such a significant date for ecommerce web data we have some great news to share!
Our team used Zyte products for an in-depth analysis to compare market trends with data demand requests received during this period – and the results were pretty impressive.
There was a clear correlation for web data requests vs market trends, our performance was off the charts… and we can say that the “Black Friday Creep” is real.
Read on to see what we uncovered during this Black Friday season.
Backstory
Black Friday and Cyber Monday may seem like 2 days of shopping mania following Thanksgiving…but there is more to that.
Although Thanksgiving day and Black Friday were historically the top selling days for the ecommerce industry, the biggest day now for ecommerce business is Cyber Monday.
According to Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday 2022 had US$11.3 billion in total spending online.
Source: Adobe Analytics, November 2022
A new phenomenon called “Black Friday Creep” has turned the Black Friday markets upside down. Forcing retailers to offer more deals earlier in the week, and for a longer period of time.
And it’s precisely what sparked our curiosity to take a deep dive into our web data requests.
Increased need for ecommerce web data
Let me show you what I mean on the patterns found during Black Friday season.
We tracked and analyzed the requests received by Zyte Smart Proxy Manager for a popular ecommerce site – starting on Tuesday (11/22) and throughout the Black Friday (11/25) and Cyber Monday (11/28) period.
The chart below represents a per hour aggregation of the traffic handled by our Smart Proxy Manager infrastructure when users are crawling this particular website where each request typically allows a customer to extract data from a single webpage.
Smart Proxy Manager infrastructure: traffic handled (per hour aggregation)
Web scraping patterns in ecommerce web data
- Cyber Monday surpassed Black Friday in volume of requests – with 61 million requests processed on this site only – compared to 46.7 million requests for Black Friday.
- We noticed a high increase of data extraction demand on the days leading up to Thanksgiving, which is when early deals get released.
- This was followed by a small 2-day valley before landing on Black Friday
- Which was again followed by a small dip – to later finish off with a high for Cyber Monday the strongest day in 2022.
- When looking at traffic numbers registered by our Smart Proxy Manager we saw a 7.88% increase when comparing just Black Friday.
- Comparing Tuesday to Monday (end of Cyber Monday) we saw 6.34% increase Year-Over-Year.
Performance
We are pleased to report over 99% extraction performance across the entire week. We delivered an increase of 3.34% on Black Friday and 3.95% higher performance across the entire week when compared to 2021.
E-commerce web data extraction performance
Conclusion
Our analysis showed a clear correlation between volume of data requests vs sales reports for the Black Friday season.
Cyber Monday surpassed Black Friday in Zyte’s data demand requests.
99% performance average across the entire week.
Black Friday Creep is real with high data demand requests across the entire week leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Interest in ecommerce web data is greater than ever – and the results prove we can deliver during the busiest of seasons. Even with high volume requests, we still provided excellent performance to our customers.
This drives us to constantly seek new ways to improve our data extraction process and provide data of the highest quality possible.
Zyte Smart Proxy Manager will not only help you get ecommerce product data, but it's a powerful tool to handle Cyber Monday & Black Friday ecommerce web data.
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Zyte is the market leader in product data extraction – with services that provide data on 3 billion products per month – so you can extract web data from any ecommerce site.
We understand the importance of web data for ecommerce and always ensure that results are accurate and up-to-date.
Contact us with your needs for ecommerce web data extraction and our team of experts will take care of it.
Definitions
Below are some of the definitions of the terms used within this article.
- Black Friday week period: From Tuesday (during Black Friday week) until the end of Monday (Cyber Monday).
- Web data extraction performance: It represents the rate at which Smart Proxy Manager effectively extracts content from the target websites. As this is a rate, it is measured as a percentage which is the total number of successful responses divided by total responses during a given period of time.
