It's Thanksgiving week, the lead-up to the biggest sales week in the year. Last year, Cyber Monday recorded the biggest online shopping day in U.S. history, and this year, brands and retailers are gearing up for an even more bountiful holiday sales kickoff.
The holidays, and Q4 in general, are always the biggest time of year for U.S. online sales, with the largest individual sales days occurring during the Cyber Five (Thanksgiving Thursday to Cyber Monday). By now, online brands and retailers' preparations are already playing out, from inventory to marketing to last-mile logistics.
The Quartile team is standing by, ready to do everything we can to ensure success for our clients. To that end, we've put together a quick, last-minute guide to managing your marketplace ad campaigns during the start of this holiday buying season, including tips on ad spend, pacing, and deals.
Increase those budget caps
Our experienced account management team recommends increasing your budget by three times your typical spend or more if you need or want to capture traffic on these big sales days. Hopefully, your ad program has been working for the last few weeks to push your marquee products into the best sellers list, giving you an organic boost as well. If not, be prepared to spend to get the necessary traffic and conversions.
Keep calm, but watch your numbers
While you increase your budget, set expectations that higher demand and competition will naturally result in higher cost-per-clicks on your ads. Our team will be monitoring your accounts and therefore don't recommend increasing your ACOS. Instead, let the increase in sales (as more customers are in-market) maintain equivalency with your ad spend.
Pause or limit campaigns around "deal" and related keywords
Due to the overabundance of discounts offered during the Cyber Five, Quartile does not recommend spending to increase the visibility of those discounts. If you plan to offer deals on products, such as Deal of the Day or Lightning deals, let your account manager know to adjust your campaigns accordingly.
Work with a partner that is as diligent as you are
Quartile account managers will be checking our clients' accounts at least 3x per day, on top of the automated optimizations that our A.I.-powered platform will be making. You can rest easy as you have the full force of best-in-class A.I. with exclusive capabilities like near-real-time automatic optimizations driven by hourly conversion data straight from our marketplace partners.
Hold that rank!
Black Friday is only days away, but your product ranking and organic visibility can still suffer if you pull back on ad spend, even temporarily. It might be tempting to hold spending to splash out on big deal days, but your sales numbers will thank you if you maintain spending in the days leading up to the Cyber Five.
Lastly, remember, Q4 is a marathon, not a sprint. There are another four weeks of gift shopping ahead of us. One Amazon survey found more than two-thirds of shoppers expect to complete their holiday shopping after Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Download this guide as a PDF and share it with your team!
It's not too late to implement best-in-class A.I. and machine-learning to boost your holiday sales this year. Set up a demo today to find out how Quartile can drive record sales to close out 2021!
