Less than twenty-four hours after Thanksgiving, it’s Black Friday.
Forty-eight hours after Black Friday, it’s Cyber Monday.
And after Cyber Monday, it’s a countdown to the holidays.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Thanksgiving weekend accounts for the biggest eCommerce opportunity. Last year, brands pulled in a record $9.5 billion on Black Friday, an increase from the previous year.
Cyber Monday is again expected to be the biggest online shopping day in history. Black Friday, Thanksgiving, and ‘Cyber Tuesday’ should also continue to rank among the leading days for the season.
Given those unprecedented numbers, we can only expect that this year will be a big opportunity for holiday advertising campaigns.
To help you optimize your holiday advertising campaigns for Thanksgiving weekend, we put together five tips for your holiday campaigns,
1. Increase bids
The holiday season can be competitive. Every marketer is fighting for the chance to get in front of their potential customers. Even with the increase of traffic in Q4, especially in November and December, this competition means bids and other performance metrics will rise.
- Think about planning ahead by increasing your base bid and max bids before Thanksgiving weekend to capitalize on increased demand.
- Take a look at historical performance to find what days saw the highest amount of traffic (i.e., Black Friday or Cyber Monday) and raise your daily budget caps to ensure you are capturing all those potential customers.
- Knowing that eCommerce doesn’t happen between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. like brick and mortar stores, try adjusting your scheduling and dayparting bid adjustments for the times of day that have produced the highest traffic.
Simply put: Plan ahead to capture increased holiday traffic by increasing bids and daily budgets.
2. Enable cross-device targeting
How are you reaching your potential customers across all their devices?
The stakes are high during the holiday season. Holiday shoppers are scrambling to finish their shopping lists, which can include browsing on their laptops, in-store visits, or holiday movie watching on Hulu.
With fierce competition, how do you ensure that you’re investing holiday marketing budgets in the most impactful and efficient way? How do you reach as many potential customers as possible? How can you make sure that your potential customer’s experience is positive and that you drive positive ROI, too?
Take advantage of rising conversion rates during the holiday peak season by enabling cross-device targeting across all your campaigns (especially on your retargeting or lower-funnel strategies).
Cross-device targeting can help you maximize your chances of finding and messaging your potential customers as they navigate across screens. If the average customer is using three to four devices to make their purchasing decision, and you’re only reaching them on their laptop, you’re missing out on ample opportunities to catch their attention on their phones, tablets, and other connected devices.
3. Pace ahead
Since the pandemic, retailers and marketers were quick to offer online promotions earlier in the year to capitalize on the holiday season. With retailers still emphasizing eCommerce, it’s likely we could see a similar holiday head start this year. An earlier start with holiday sales will also help avoid fulfillment issues later in the holiday season as well.
Take advantage of the early start this holiday season by adjusting your campaign budgets to pace ahead. Pacing ahead will enable you to capture impressions for all your potential customers.
Remember that pacing is more than looking at your daily spend. Rather than making sure that your digital advertising campaign is pacing evenly across the entire holiday season, ask yourself if you need to reserve budget to boost spend on specific days, such as promotions? Are there more important days, such as the last day for shipping?
Taking these questions into consideration, along with your goals for the holiday season, should ensure that you are hitting appropriate pacing levels even with the holiday season kicking off early
4. Activate mobile audiences
Thanksgiving weekend isn’t limited to eCommerce. Brick and mortar store visits are still on consumer checklists. As consumers are spreading out their holiday shopping across different destinations, in-store and online, you should look for ways to engage them where ever they are or where they have been. With geofencing, you could reach mobile devices to reach individuals while they are participating in the holiday shopping weekend. Or, you could leverage geoframing to target individuals on other devices after they have left their holiday shopping locations.
Our geofencing and geoframing partner has ready-to-use holiday shopping audiences that include over 475 place categories and over 270 branded chains.
| Place | Behavioral |
|---|---|
| Cards & stationery | Holiday shoppers |
| Jewelry & watches | Big box shoppers |
| Shopping centers | Eco-friendly shoppers |
| Toys | Holiday deal seeker |
| Electronics Shopper |
Need a quick refresher on geofencing and geoframing and how you can enable these tactics in your holiday campaigns?
5. Leverage high buying signals
The buying process is quick during the holiday season. Your potential customer can move through awareness to consideration to purchase phases in a matter of a couple hours. With the increased competition, it’s vital to capture that potential customer when they are in the prime purchase mindset. Even with the consumers that do their holiday shopping earlier, there will still be a rush in November and December for consumers to finish their shopping.
So here’s how can you take advantage of the rush:
- Think about using your CRM list of recent purchases to reach those customers most likely to buy additional products or services or for cross-selling opportunities. Marketing efforts that focus on increasing second orders can yield a higher purchase frequency to drive significant ROI.
- Try targeting sites that have content related to gift guides or shopping lists for the holidays with contextual keyword targeting. Add keywords like a holiday gift guide, travel gifts, holiday gifts for tech, gift ideas, etc.
- Retargeting (with recency): Recency is one of the most critical variables in retargeting, especially during the holiday season. You want to make bid adjustments so you are bidding higher for consumers soon after they’ve visited your site so you can stay top of mind.
Make your list and check it twice
As you prepare your advertising campaigns for the holiday season, don’t forget that we’re here to help. You can think of us as your elves in the digital advertising workshop.
