Developing the right holiday ecommerce strategies for 2022 will be a challenge for many brands. Between rising inflation rates, a looming recession, unprecedented consumer shopping habits, and other challenges in the shopping landscape, your brand needs to make sure to focus on the right goals and priorities in order to grow profitably this holiday season.
In this article, we’ll explore 6 holiday ecommerce strategies for 2022 that your brand can’t afford to ignore:
- Track the right holiday KPIS
- Target relevant customers with a full-funnel, omni-channel strategy
- Make sure your product feeds are accurate and optimized
- Get your ads ready on time!
- Leverage creative video to compel your target audience
- Don’t forget about retargeting
Let’s explore the strategies and trends you need to know for a successful 2022 holiday shopping season.
1. Track the Right Holiday KPIs
Due to the tumultuous shopping climate this year, many brands may focus more on getting in front of more people than ensuring profitability. For your brand, choosing the right KPIs to track all depends on your goals and the channels you’re advertising on.
Goal: Grow traffic
- KPIs to track: Click impressions, impression share
Goal: Increase profitability
- KPIs to track: Conversion rate, return on ad spend (ROAS), return on investment (ROI)
For brands that advertise on social media, video is currently a huge initiative. KPIs that will be crucial to track for social media video include the percentage of video views completed, the percentage of users who watch your Story, and link impressions.
For your Amazon holiday ecommerce strategy, your KPIs won’t be much different than they usually are. Amazon is always launching new ways to reach customers that require new tracking capabilities. One KPI that has increased in importance to track on Amazon is the number of product review pageviews associated with an ad, which can be tracked through Amazon DSP. Reviews and ratings help a lot in improving your Amazon SEO. There are also new capabilities for advertisers to measure the stages between awareness and consideration more closely.
Dive deeper into how to track the right KPIs with these blog posts:
- Top 9 Business-Level Amazon KPIs You Need to Calculate
- Key KPIs for Full-Funnel Programmatic Advertising
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
Q4 can also be a huge chance for your brand to test Facebook video and see how effective it is, especially since it can be less straightforward than YouTube. Facebook videos should be 5-26 seconds long, erring on the shorter side of that spectrum.
2. Target Relevant Customers With a Full-Funnel, Omnichannel Strategy
If you want to grow sales during the holiday shopping months, don’t make the mistake of cutting back your Q3 budget and focusing only on your Q4 efforts. To increase your brand awareness and keep interested traffic in your funnel, you’ll need to spend your advertising budget strategically in both Q3 and Q4.
Casting a wide net by opening up audiences and focusing on the top of the funnel will help you drive more sales in Q4 – even if it means a lower ROAS. Social media platforms are a great place to focus your upper-funnel awareness efforts.
Pairing your social media efforts with your paid search advertising can help bolster your ROAS levels by covering the entire path to purchase. Consider allowing more ad spend into your upper- and middle-funnel efforts in Q3 to pave the way for retargeting and lower-funnel efforts in Q4.
Many shoppers use Amazon to buy “need to have” products such as home items and groceries that they want to arrive within a few hours or 1-2 days, then conveniently purchase “want to have” items while they’re already shopping. With the looming recession and rising inflation rates, many shoppers feel wary about spending their discretionary income. If your brand’s products fall in the “want to have” category, consider trying to reach shoppers in the “need to have” mindset who may be open to purchasing your product while they’re shopping for the items they need.
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
During the Q4 holidays, consumers are buying more items for their loved ones as opposed to for themselves. This can make finding your ideal audience to target more difficult. Consider opening up more demographic limits on your audiences during the holidays.
3. Make Sure Your Product Feeds Are Accurate & Optimized
With all of the supply chain issues that have been straining businesses since the onset of the pandemic, be aware of any potential pain points from a product inventory standpoint as far ahead of time as you can.
Do you have low inventory on any products and feel worried about being able to fill orders for them?Even if not, it’s a good idea to get consistent updates on your inventory levels – even once an hour. It will be critical to ensure you update your product feeds to reflect your site’s inventory.
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
From a product feeds perspective, as always, you should keep a close eye on Google Merchant Center for warnings and disapprovals. You don’t want to fall into the trap of spending all of your time developing a thorough strategy that you expect to drive highly profitable conversions just to have a huge spike in disapprovals or even suspensions that go unattended and cause huge dips in performance. ROI Revolution has a dedicated team of product feed experts who leverage years of expertise plus our in-house technology to constantly monitor your account and resolve issues as soon as possible so that downtime is minimized. Connect with us today to learn more!
4. Get Your Ads Ready on Time
From a product feeds accuracy standpoint, it’s also important to follow along with recommended timelines for ads on Google, Meta, Amazon, or wherever else you advertise.
Have your promotion information for your Cyber 5 and post-Cyber 5 sales ready as early as you can. Holiday promotions – especially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday – can take more time than usual to get approved because of the high volume of submissions. Two weeks should be a safe buffer for you to submit your ads to Google and get them approved, or to make the changes necessary for approval. One week is probably okay. 72 hours is the bare minimum and pretty risky.
On Amazon, approvals for pushing Store changes or other manual updates like Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Brands Video may take more time than usual. Typically, approval takes up to 48 hours, but right now and leading up to the holiday season, brands should give their ads a week to get approved. On top of that, some ads are being disapproved without explanation, which requires more manual work on behalf of your brand. It’s better to be safe and give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
Many brands want to make changes to Cyber 5 sales in the days leading up to the event – but doing that means risking inaccurate promotional information in your ads. Promotions can be shut off immediately before they are supposed to go live, but there’s no guarantee that your new promotion will be approved in time. It’s best to make your decision several weeks before the event and stick to it instead of making any last-minute changes.
5. Leverage Creative Video to Compel Your Target Audience
In general, it’s a best practice in social media for your ads to be videos instead of static images. Working with a creative partner can help a lot with this, especially if you don’t have the bandwidth in-house to create the creative you desire.
Video is big in paid search right now, too. Performance Max even has a video component, and brands can create their own videos or leverage Google Video Builder to get updated creative. YouTube is great for brand awareness and broad reach during the holidays, especially if you can provide updated assets to build brand presence and ad recall.
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
At this year’s Google Marketing Live, Google announced more Shopping ad placements on YouTube, giving brands another way to reach shoppers through video. YouTube generated $7.34 billion in ad revenue in Q2 2022 alone, making it a great opportunity for brands to generate profitable revenue and awareness this holiday season.
6. Don’t Forget About Remarketing
Many brands also run sales in the days between Christmas and the New Year to clear out their warehouse, which could be a good way to mitigate inventory issues. Shoppers who purchased from your brand during the holiday season are great to remarket to. Most brands, however, pull back their advertising spend before last shipping dates and don’t ramp back up again until the New Year. It all depends on your goals and your inventory levels.
ROI 2022 Holiday Ecommerce Strategy Tip
Remarketing is often focused on brands that have seasonality in Q1, such as fitness or coffee (lots of people receive coffee machines as gifts during the holidays!). If your brand has Q4 and Q1 seasonality, your holiday shoppers could be great customers to target during Q1.
Tying It All Together: Holiday Ecommerce Strategies for 2022
Developing profitable holiday ecommerce strategies for 2022 will be a challenge for many brands this year. By following the strategies outlined in this article, you’ll be on your way to a revenue-boosting Q4. If you want additional insights into ensuring not just a profitable holiday season but also a profitable new year and beyond, reach out to our team of experts today!
Sources
- Google Ads & Commerce Blog. Building the future of marketing together.
- Statista. Worldwide advertising revenues of YouTube as of 2nd quarter 2022.
