Prepare your organization with a gameplan, but remain nimble – both for unexpected issues and for changes in performance – by implementing and adjusting your automation to account for higher frequency. Leverage automated functions, pre-built reports, and automated warnings to collect information quickly. This will allow your team to focus on incremental tweaks and strategic decisions on the fly. Implement automated ad scheduling, labels, custom labels to adjust for seasonal products, pre-determined bid adjustments, and other features to take the heavy lifting off the marketing team. Ensure warnings and urgent notifications are not restricted to bottlenecks – open up communication to keep the team agile.
Alex Turowski – Director, Performance Marketing
New Engen
With Christmas, comes the biggest shopping event of the year – Black Friday. No longer just a one-day event in the US, where people queued up outside stores the day after Thanksgiving to bag a bargain, it is now a global phenomenon, with offers up for grabs from Thursday, right the way through to Cyber Monday, and beyond.
As competition is extremely high around this time of the year, a key way for businesses to achieve effectiveness in their campaigns is to use their own visitor data to their advantage. Audience targeting options offered by online advertising platforms have become more sophisticated in recent times. By creating and applying segmented audiences based on user behaviour to campaigns, businesses will be able to tailor ad messaging and bids accordingly. This requires planning the audiences you will need for your campaigns and creating them in advance, so they will have populated and been eligible to use by the time your campaigns are going live.
Preparation shouldn’t just stop at this year’s campaigns, however. As well as using data to inform the approach for this year, businesses should also be seeking ways to collect data now which will help inform future campaigns. This could include setting up heatmapping reports to optimise the checkout process; ensuring all valuable user behaviour on the website is being tracked, and implementing cross-device tracking to get a comprehensive picture of user journeys.
45% of people start their shopping before Black Friday; this means that in order for businesses to get the best results out of their campaigns, they need to follow suit and ensure that they are planning their strategy well in advance.
Lisa Venney – Digital Strategist
Minerva Digital
Online retailers should take the time to make sure their e-commerce websites load as fast as possible. Now is the time to perform maintenance and updates to ensure they can handle the extra traffic over the holiday period. Slow website performance negatively affects conversion rates. So if your site loads slowly, consumers are more likely to leave and purchase somewhere else. Google has a great page speed testing tool that will give you ideas on how to improve your site.
Danica Hoppe – Digital Marketing Strategist
White Hat Digital
See more tips from Xponent21, Reprise Digital, and Mabo.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
