By Brandon Bauer
For digital marketers, the holiday e-commerce season is never far from mind. But now that the calendar has turned from summer to fall, it’s time to shift fully into planning mode. After all, the biggest shopping season of the year only lasts six weeks, so we had better make the most of it.
As you begin mapping out your holiday strategy, keep these three things in mind:
1. Be mindful of past data
If you’ve run holiday campaigns in the past, you already have a wealth of information at your fingertips. Before starting any planning, consult your e-commerce data from the last two years with an eye for the big takeaways. Determine what worked and what did not. Are there trends you can take advantage of? Is there something you wish you’d done differently? Look for sales spikes you might be able to anticipate and leverage again this year.
Then, examine the same data from late summer and early fall of this year. Has anything changed? Are there new competitors that didn’t previously exist? You may be surprised what insights your sales history holds, so don’t overlook it.
2. Consider shifting some budget to early November
Many marketers reserve the majority of their holiday advertising budget for the few weeks between Black Friday and Christmas. However, digital marketers are seeing more purchasing happening early in November and, as a result, ad dollars are starting to follow. This tracks with buying behavior as consumers expect early promotions and deals.
I’m a big advocate for getting customers while you can, so consider targeting those early shoppers using a portion of your holiday budget. There’s no reason to intentionally miss out on early November revenue because you’re holding out for something that might be better in December. And, with a round of tariffs on Chinese goods set to hit mid-December, there’s reason to believe that consumers might start the holiday shopping season even earlier this year—possibly before Black Friday—to take advantage of current pricing on must-have items.
As an added bonus, you may be able to meet your holiday return-on-ad-spend goals earlier in the month at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than if you waited until later in November. CPC costs always spike on Black Friday from the increased competition.
3. Take a dashboard snapshot
One of the biggest challenges of the holiday e-commerce season is returning back to normal once the promotions end. If you’ve switched to a more aggressive bidding strategy to compete for all those new eyeballs and don’t back off quickly enough, you risk blowing your monthly budget out of the water. At the same time, rediscovering the pre-holiday balance you spent months perfecting can take time.
We’ve developed a simple solution to this problem depending on the size of your campaigns. For smaller accounts, I recommend taking screenshots of all your current keyword and product group bids. For larger accounts, you’ll want to export a backup of all of your campaigns using Google Ads Editor, for example. Regardless of which method you use, when the holidays are over, you’ll have a handy guide ready to help recalibrate your campaigns back to normal.
It’s never too early to plan for next year
Digital marketers are in the business of building on success and learning from their failures. As this year’s e-commerce campaign plays out, it forms the basis for what happens next year. With that in mind, here are three tips you can use during this year’s campaign that will set you up to achieve even better results in the coming year.