Buyer behavior changes just as significantly leading up to the holiday season as it does following the holiday season, and as a result seller strategy needs to shift through the holiday season and the end of the year.
Laura Pattison, Head of Premium Services, breaks down essential advertising strategies and shifts through the end of the year and into the start of 2022. Continue reading for a full strategic breakdown, or watch the brief video interview here.
Let’s start the breakdown with an example.
Let’s assume you sell knitting kits on Amazon. One of your most recent purchases came from someone looking for last-minute knitting kits as gifts for her family and bought your product after seeing one of your well-placed ads pop up (Nice!)
While your customer is relieved to have a number of quality knitting kits on the way, your advertising & retargeting strategy for customers like this after the holiday shopping season is essential to get right (and often overlooked).
Customers like the one above don’t shop for items like this on a regular basis. The intent here is to purchase something for someone else as a gift. If you retarget customers like this through the rest of the year and into 2022, they will likely:
- Recognize your brand putting a lot of knitting kits in their face over and over again
- Not want to purchase your product anymore, with their need for gifts already fulfilled
- Be put off from your brand as a result of seeing so many unwanted knitting kits
The end result is a lot of ad budget wasted on people with low-intent to purchase and a not-so-great experience for your brand.
This example is one of many, but the primary principle remains the same: Your advertising and seller strategies need to shift through the holiday season into the new year.
If you want to set your early 2022 up for success, you can’t just set it & forget it. You need to be intentional in understanding your products and customer buyer behavior.
How should you adjust through the end of the year and into 2022?
The answers are going to vary depending on your product and category, however there are a couple general rules of thumb for holiday-seasonal items through the rest of the year:
- Decrease your bids. The value of clicks are decreasing as conversion rate decreases following the holiday season. Keep an eye on your bids and consider decreasing them incrementally.
- Consider pausing or pulling back on retargeting campaigns. Especially for DSP, people (like in the example above) are shopping for others. Continually targeting those shoppers with ads could result in budget money wasted.
- Pay attention to your lookback windows. If you have a three or five day look back window, in three to five days you can relaunch paused campaigns and have a whole new set of members in an audience that are more relevant to you.
The period of time between now and the start of the new year is a wild one for e-commerce sellers. Consider making some small changes to your campaigns to save on budget and set your 2022-self up for success.
