For Online Holiday Shoppers, Santa Comes Early This Year

The Team

Prep your campaigns for six fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas

The online holiday shopping season starts, well, yesterday. And this year there are six fewer shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As you can see from the chart below, many of the 2013 key shopping days fall much closer to Christmas this year. Retail advertisers, take note!

Six days doesn’t seem like much, but during prime shopping season those six days are critical to reaching your sales goals. A shorter holiday shopping season provides an ideal opportunity to highlight the conveniences of online shopping even more. Here are some easy ways to take advantage of this:

  • Make sure to increase your bids and budgets to stay competitive (and online) during this very busy time.

  • Start writing holiday-specific ads now utilizing “Free Shipping,” “Shop Today” and “Buy Now,” so by the time the holidays roll around you can set your best-performing ads to rotate evenly.

  • Cyber Monday and Black Friday rank as the heaviest online spending days. Review last year’s campaigns to determine what went well and what went not so well.

  • The first day of Hanukkah falls on Thanksgiving Day this year, so shoppers will need to have their gifts purchased and wrapped before they sit down for turkey. This fact shows that it’s never too early to get your holiday messaging out there or to add holiday-related keywords.

Start looking at the shorter holiday shopping season as an opportunity to go after those early shoppers! Be sure to check out our Holiday Toolkit for specific actions that you can take to be ready for the upcoming season.

-- The Team