Influencers and other affiliate marketers drove 20% of Cyber Monday e-commerce revenue

• Influencers and other affiliates drove about 20% of US Cyber Monday revenue, per Adobe Analytics.
• Posts with affiliate links were six times as likely to lead to a sale as other social content was.
• Social shopping has been on the rise in the US, as platforms like TikTok lean into e-commerce.

Influencers are helping to boost sales this holiday season — and getting paid to do so.

Social-media influencers and other content makers that recommend products via affiliate links helped drive about 20% of US e-commerce revenue on Cyber Monday, according to new data from Adobe Analytics. That's a roughly 7% year-over-year increase from 2023, the company said.

Affiliate linking is a marketing strategy where a figure of influence, such as a TikTok star or a product-review writer at Wirecutter, shares an item and earns a commission if someone buys it via a referral link.

Adobe Analytics found that products promoted via an affiliate link were six times as likely to lead to a purchase compared to content posted on social media by a brand or user that did not contain an affiliate-marketing or comparable promotional link.

This suggests that professional product endorsers are more effective at driving sales than other social-media users, Taylor Schreiner, a senior director at Adobe Digital Insights, told Business Insider.

"We're bombarded with information from all sorts of different channels, and people are finding that a recommendation from another brand they trust, be it an individual or a broader one, is of a lot of value to them in this attention-sapped environment," Schreiner said.

Affiliate marketing has become an increasingly important tactic for driving e-commerce sales as more consumers, and young shoppers in particular, turn to bloggers and other digital creators to decide what to buy. Fifty-two percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said their purchase decisions were influenced by social-media creators either somewhat or very often, per a YouGov survey conducted in December 2023.

Companies like Amazon, Walmart, and LTK have spent years building affiliate programs to compensate creators who drive sales.

LTK cofounder and president Amber Venz Box told BI that the company's creator partners were "able to earn a commission on pretty much every product that they're talking about, featuring, and using in their own lives." LTK said its creators drive billions in retail sales annually.

Social shopping has generally been on the rise this year, as platforms like TikTok introduce more robust e-commerce features, including live shopping. TikTok Shop drove over $100 million in single-day sales on Black Friday, a company spokesperson said.

Overall, consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on e-commerce in the US on Cyber Monday, a 7.3% increase from the previous year, Adobe Analytics reported. Online spend for the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday reached  $41.1 billion. For its estimates, Adobe said it analyzes commerce transactions online across over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites and 100 million unique products, or SKUs.