Holiday Prep Webinar Series: Crafting Winning Ad Campaigns for the Holidays

TRANSCRIPT

Marissa

00:07

Thank you everybody for joining us today. We’ll give a couple minutes for more people to join. In the meantime, happy Tuesday.

00:22

Thank you. Looks like people are joining quickly. We’re excited to learn about advertising campaigns. I think we have a quorum, so we’ll go ahead and get started.

00:39

I’m Marissa, the Associate Director of Content at Feedvisor. You probably recognize me from the last webinar. Today we have Doug Kaplan, Head of Programmatic.

 00:53

He has decades of experience in the e -commerce world and actually had the pleasure of working on Amazon to help build their DSPs. We’re very excited to have him with us. We’re excited to have him with us, and he brings valuable experience to help clients get the most out of Feedvisor.

01:07

We also have Brianne Cellemme and she’s an e -commerce ad specialist on the brand services team. She’s been assisting sellers and brands with growing their online businesses for 11 years. She has a specific focus on Amazon and Walmart advertising. 

 01:23

Last but not least, we have Lily Kleinbub, who also has years of experience in e-commerce advertising. She works with a diverse range of clients with many smaller sellers, so larger brands across both Amazon and Walmart. 

 01:36

We’re very excited to have everybody here with us. First, I’ll let you guys know about Feedvisor for those of you who are joining us. 

01:50

We are an e-commerce company, around since 2011, purpose-built for Amazon e-marketplaces. We provide advertising and pricing optimization and were one of the first to use artificial intelligence and machine learning.

02:05

We have deep expertise in 1P and 3P and are now in Walmart, which is exciting. We’ll get into that later. Now for the agenda: we’ll talk about understanding this year’s holiday shopping landscape.

02:22

It’s different from previous years, and we have consumer behavior insights from our research. Then, we’ll dive into crafting effective ad campaigns on Amazon, expanding to Walmart, and other e-marketplaces.

02:39

Next, we’ll discuss social opportunities and preparing for post-holiday campaigns. As you know, your job isn’t done after the holidays.

02:54

First up, challenges facing e-commerce this holiday season. Christmas creep is crazier than ever. We’ve seen Christmas celebrations and products appearing in stores and online much earlier, which leads us to the next point, which Lily will cover—Cyber 5 is now Cyber 12.

03:18

Lily, do you want to talk more about that?

Lily

03:20

With the Christmas Creep and Cyber Five becoming Cyber 12, consumer spend on holiday purchases now ranges from September all the way to December. However, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest times for consumers to snag the best deals and shops. 

 03:37

52% of consumers say they shop for deals during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and 72% of consumers say they wait to make a big purchase until one of these events. With the shortened holiday season, there’s still a longer advertising period. 

 03:53

It’s an even more complicated advertising period than normal with election ads driving up campaign spend. Advertisers must maneuver inflated inventory prices. Inventory is expected to drive up the cost of advertising at an all time high. 

 04:10

Compared to the 2020 election, it’s projected that ad costs will grow by 13% this year. Advertisers will need to increase their advertising investment and think strategically to maintain the same media impact and performance that they have in previous years. 

 04:33

Here’s some consumer behavior insights for Q4, starting with this year’s holiday shoppers are strongly driven by reviews. In an effort to stay within budget, 36% of consumers said that they’re conducting research online before buying their product. 

 04:51

They want to stay within the budget they’ve allocated for the holidays. They’re also prioritizing product reviews in this process. 76% of shoppers seek product reviews on the platform. It’s very important to ensure that your PDPs are optimized with reviews during the holiday season. 

05:12

We’re also seeing customers start to trade down. They continue to buy, but they’re spending far less on those purchases. This holiday season, nearly 80% of customers are planning to shift their shopping behaviors, opting for lower prices more than they have in the past. 

05:30

They’re also consuming more short -term videos, which Doug can give you more information on. 

Doug

05:36

Thanks, Brianne. As we all know, short form video has become extremely popular with global ad spend expected to increase by 50% annually. It hit more than $145 billion by 2028, which is a massive 65% increase in five years. 

 05:52

The average spending per user on these platforms was also increasing significantly, rising from $17 in 2023 to an expected $24 in 2028. While many platforms are entering this space, TikTok is clearly leading the charge, but other platforms are emulating some of their most prominent features, such as LinkedIn, which is testing a TikTok -like vertical feed for short form videos within the app. 

 06:17

Amazon has released its own vertical videos for sponsored brands. YouTube Shorts continues to see a rise in viewership and increased convergence. To summarize, short form video is not going anywhere. It has a very unique role in the media mix — TV ads primed with a TikTok ad see 5 .5x sales increase. 

Marissa

06:39

That’s awesome. Lily, do you want to tell us about the differences in consumer expectations on Amazon and Walmart?

Lily 

 06:47

A main difference between customers on Walmart and Amazon is there’s an income difference. This results in Walmart customers generally leaning towards more well -known household brands and very deal -driven budget brands, whereas premium luxury products do better on Amazon than Walmart. Amazon has also added many premium brands to its marketplace. That signals that the demand for luxury products is stronger on Amazon. 

 07:17

For example, within the beauty category, Amazon’s popular premium beauty brands include Clinique and Kiehl’s — and on Walmart, a very popular brand in their beauty section would be ELF which is a little bit more budget friendly. 

 07:34

Another thing that speaks to this difference in income between customers is the price of Amazon Prime compared to Walmart. Amazon Prime is $1 .39 a year where Walmart Plus is $98 a year. 

Brianne 

07:51

We are seeing Walmart customers are far less likely to purchase that membership, likely because of that budgeting. Due to this, we recommend that if your products are over, or under the $35 minimum spend for free shipping, that you not use the Walmart Filament Services, because that could have a negative impact on sales, there’s less people out there with that membership. 

 08:18

We’re also seeing that Walmart shoppers tend to spend both on Amazon and Walmart, whereas Amazon Prime members tend to shop just on Amazon. They’re more loyal there. We’re seeing Walmart Plus members spend about 26% of their dollars on Walmart and about 12% on Amazon, whereas Amazon Prime members tend to be a little bit more even, spending 15% at Walmart and 13% at Amazon. 

 08:47

We’ve also seen that 45% of Walmart Plus subscribers also have an Amazon Prime account, so they tend to have both subscriptions. This can indicate an overlap in this consumer basis. Again, they could be comparing prices, comparing listings, and looking at reviews. 

 09:07

Make sure to keep everything consistent from marketplace to marketplace. Location and region can also be a key difference between the marketplaces. Walmart Plus members generally reside in regions where there’s a physical Walmart store.

 09:30

These include the South Atlantic, West, South Central, East, South Central divisions of the US, but Amazon Prime members tend to be more spread out evenly throughout the US, especially in urban cities. 

Marissa

 09:45

Great. Thank you both. Now let’s get to the part where everyone’s been waiting, which is crafting those actual effective ad campaigns on Amazon here. So Brianne, do you want to start us off with some sponsored ad best practices? 

Brianne

 09:56

Certainly. Generally, if your budget allows, we recommend running and ramping up your campaigns two to three weeks in advance of the tentpole event. This allows the Amazon algorithm to determine relevance of your keywords for your products. 

 10:12

Generally, when you first start a campaign, you’ll see higher CPCs. You want those to normalize before the tentpole event, so you’re not spending extra during that event. If your budget does not allow it, try using existing campaigns and adding new keywords to them to try and capitalize on the historic data your campaigns have already gathered. 

 10:34

We also recommend you choose mid to low volume keywords — ones that are hyper relevant to your product, short tail keywords that are only one or two words long, or tend to be non -specific and highly competitive, which means they’re expensive. 

 10:50

To reach a better audience and get a higher click through rate and higher conversion rate, we recommend doing longer tail keywords. For example: if you’re selling polo shirts. Instead of bidding on “polo shirt” by itself, bid on “blue men’s polo shirt” or with those modifiers that are very specific to your product. 

 11:11

In that same vein, we recommend you utilize negative targeting to reduce wasted ad spend, removing anything that is not relevant to your product colors, age groups. We’re also seeing in the holiday season, people search for gifts by pricing. 

 11:26

Something like “gifts under $10”. Definitely negate any of those price points that don’t make sense for your product. We also recommend you utilize bid multipliers. You can find these in both sponsored products and sponsored brands. 

 11:42

They allow you to increase your bids by a certain percentage for select placement types. For sponsored products, we recommend top of search and possibly the product page placements to increase because those tend to do better. 

 11:57

Sponsored brands actually only has non -top of search as a placement, but you can do a negative or specify to decrease by a certain percent. If you want sponsored brands to show up at the top, have that decreased percent for everything else. 

 12:15

Lastly, because performance varies from category to category, we suggest you review prior ad performance on big tentpole events to make sure you’re using the ads that work the best for your products in your category. 

 12:37

Let’s take a look at best practices for ad creative specifically for sponsored brands. If you’re using existing campaigns, but swapping out the creative, we recommend you swap either the sale ASINs in or completely change the creative at least a week in advance. 

 12:56

If you can do it earlier than that, that’d be great. We want to make sure that you have enough time to go through that review process, which can take up to three days and can be very intense, especially on the days of the tentpole events. 

 13:11

It gives them time to ramp up and get more historic data before the sale actually starts. If you’re leaning towards using a sale specific creative, there are a few things you need to keep in mind before submitting it to make sure it is approved. 

 13:28

You want to make sure your headline meets the guidelines. Very often with sales creative, people will try to use a dollar sign — and that’s against the guidelines. It will be rejected, so make sure you’re not putting a certain dollar amount off in the headline. 

 13:45

You also want to make sure your campaign has an end date. Any sale messaging requires the campaign to have an end date. Lastly, make sure ASINs already have the sale in price slash at the time of submission. 

 14:01

You can’t submit them earlier than your sale, unfortunately. If you want to run a sale a little earlier, make sure everything’s set before the tentpole event, otherwise you have to submit the day off — and there are those delays. 

 14:21

Best practices for sponsored display ads: they do auto populate. You can see there, on the right, is without any creative elements, but you do have the option to add sponsored or creative elements that are similar to the sponsored brand ads. 

 14:40

You can use similar images and videos, and a logo and a headline. The neat thing about the sponsored display is that you get to pick and choose which ones you like — you don’t have to do all of them. 

 14:52

You can do a logo or just a headline. We do recommend you A -B test and try different creatives and see which ones work best for your products. 

Marissa

 15:05

Great, and now we’ll dig into some best practices for DSP because I’m sure we’re all excited about those two. Doug, want to take it away from here?

Doug 

 15:12

Sure. Thanks, Marissa. The DSP, as many of you know, is a pretty critical tool in the arsenal when it comes to building awareness for your brand and any upcoming promotions you might have, especially during holiday temple events such as Prime Big Deals Day or Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

 15:27

We urge clients to consider what’s called a lead in period, similar to what Brianne alluded to on the sponsored side, meaning promoting your products and ramping up spend before the event begins. 

 15:36

This helps drive traffic to your pages, increasing your interest in your products during what we consider to be a relatively less competitive period — before the actual event and promotion begins. Lead -in is a very critical way to let your customers or potential customers know you have these upcoming promotions, but it is not required for all advertisers. 

 15:55

It’s something that’s unique to each based on your individual scenario. For example, if you’re in a competitive category, lead -in does require a significant investment in spend just to compete, and you need to be willing to spend as much as your competition is. 

 16:10

If you don’t have the budget to compete, at minimum, you have to at least reach out to your brand store and PDP visitors to make sure that you’re keeping them on your pages as much as possible and playing defense during this period. 

 16:24

There’s a few other best practices we want to mention, similar to what we discussed for sponsored ads earlier. Use existing campaigns when possible. These campaigns have accumulated learnings, net new campaigns don’t, and the window for these campaigns to deliver is short and won’t be as effective once that data is accumulated. 

 16:42

If you do have sufficient budget, and you are able to allocate a large amount of that towards lead -in, be mindful that the platform is not very good at ramping up spend that sharp in that short of a period of time. 

 16:54

While the lead -in period helps promote your offers early, you also need to allow the system to ramp up spend logically. If you need multiple lead -in periods just to ramp that spend up, make sure you do that. 

 17:06

There is no set in stone rule on how ramp up should be done, but we try to avoid the magnitude of increase during that period. This is compared to what the spend was from the evergreen period prior to lead -in. 

 17:18

Don’t focus on only product specific campaigns. This is a great opportunity to get your brand out there, especially if you have a recognizable one. We’re focusing on an overall awareness for your brand and the halo effects that it has during this increased spend period. 

 17:30

The last best practice is to note that Amazon is extremely restrictive on what promotions or deal messaging can be said on creatives. Think about building awareness for your brands and driving traffic to your PDPs or your brand store, even without explicit messaging on the creatives about the promotion — you’re going to organically build interest for the customers for the event itself. 

 17:50

Once the event is over, before the next one begins, there’s no real exit strategy back to evergreen. We’ll go into this a bit more later. The sharp increase we discussed for lead -in is not as big of a deal when it comes to the sharp decrease back to evergreen. 

 18:05

There’s rarely a negative consequence for that large of a spend decrease. The system acclimates itself pretty well from having large amounts of data and being able to apply that to a small spend. So lead -out is not proven to exist as its own strategy, rather a time for clients to transition back to evergreen spend levels and strategies. 

Marissa

 18:25

Thank you, Doug. Now, let’s go ahead and talk about promotions and deal badging, because I’m sure there’s times we want to get into there. So Lily, you want to take us away? 

Lilt

 18:34

Sure, thank you. For sponsored product, sponsored display, and sponsored brand product collection ads, your deal badging will show up automatically when the sale price is live. You don’t have to worry about doing anything there. 

 18:48

For sponsored brand video ads, they don’t display that deal badging automatically. You might want to consider turning off those video ads to allocate budget towards the sponsored brand product collection ad instead. 

 19:03

What do I do if my badges aren’t displaying correctly? A little bit of context: on Prime Day of this year, the deal badging was not displaying correctly. This was a widespread issue. Prime support was extremely overwhelmed. 

 19:18

It may not get back to you in time if this happens again. If it does happen, you can switch out the products that don’t have the badging for those that are showing correctly. If it’s not showing at all, you might want to focus your spend and switch up your strategy towards those products that have a discount. 

Marissa

 19:40

Thank you, Lily. Another unknown to plan for is what to do with your inventory shorts or their backlogs. Brianne here has an example of how we’ve helped a customer using their ad strategy with this specific problem. 

Brianne

 19:54

Okay, so the challenge was that it was an apparel brand. They had their products packaged specifically in gift packaging for the holidays, and they wanted to create a successful holiday campaign that maximized sales, even though they had a limited budget because inventory ended up being limited. 

 20:11

Specifically, they ended up cutting their December ad budget by 58 percent from what it was in November, and we had to figure out how to help with that. Our strategy was to ramp up spend in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and it peaked at around the week of 12/17. 

 20:36

During lead out, we minimized the spend and tightened everything up to get the best AcOS that we could with what budget we had. We also noticed that the average order value dropped during this time period, indicating people weren’t buying those gift packs as much as single products post -Christmas, but the campaigns were still running and were still profitable. 

 21:07

We were also very reactive with our ads. Our budget shifted week over week based on campaign performance and those inventory levels, and also at the same time we ran an A -B test with the sponsored brands creative. 

 21:20

We had one creative that showed the product on a model and one creative that showed the product in that gift packaging. What we found was that the creative that led to more clicks by having a higher click -through rate was given preference by Amazon, so it got way more impressions than the one that actually converted better and generated a better AcOS in the end. 

 21:47

Our takeaways are to not put all of your eggs in one basket. If your budget allows, try to reserve some budget for lead -in to improve ROI, and then also reserve some budget for lead out to take advantage of post -holiday traffic and less competition post -Christmas. Use A -B testing to see which types of creatives resonate the best with customers for your products and which ones meet your goals. 

Marissa

 22:19

Thank you, Brianne. Speaking of budgets, we do have some tips here for ad budget allocation and management, which we’ll have the team go through specifically for different budgets here, since not everyone’s going to have the same amount of money to put towards these high pressure events.

22:33

Lily, do you want to take it away and start for us? 

Lily 

22:37

Starting from the lower budget, but the top of the funnel. For this investment range, it’s important to utilize your lower funnel tactics which focus on efficiency. The best way to start with that is to refine your overall targeting to those top converting keywords on those that have historically worked best for you and your product, your exact phrase match, keyword types, and focus your spend primarily on the sponsored product apps. 

 23:05

These are the foundation of our advertising coverage and they also tend to have lower CPC so it’s a great spot to focus the majority of your strategy on in this budget range. 

Marissa 

23:16

Doug, what can people do in this range for DSP? Anything? 

Doug

 23:20

They definitely can. It does vary based on the budget available in your KPI. We know that sponsored is a foundational platform. But when available, we always recommend adding DSP on top. 

 23:32

Going through the different qualifications — if your KPI is reach, you need to think about casting a wider net that typically does require a larger budget. This budget level does create some difficulties in accommodating that. 

 23:46

If you’re focusing on performance KPIs such as, detail page rates or ROAS, this requires less users because focusing on customers who’ve already been to your pages is a lot easier to focus on. 

 23:58

It requires a smaller audience with less spend. So for example, with $10 ,000 or less, you would want to focus more on brand store products and abandoned cart retargeting strategies. These are those smaller audiences, but they do typically perform higher. 

 24:11

With more budget, you add broader strategies such as contextual and targeted prospecting display ads. Contextual is critically valuable, as it relies less on accumulated learnings, since it’s placement, not audience based, but spend $10 ,000 based on traffic lines. 

 24:27

These are good in short bursts, but contextual is a finite audience. We need to make sure that we take that into account when thinking about delivery. As we move on to the next funnel, that 10 to 20 band does typically apply to that 20 to 50 band as well. 

 24:42

I’ll let Brianne continue on with that. 

Brianne

 24:47

In that 20 to 50k range, we suggest adding some more mid funnel tactic to increase consideration. You can expand into generic targets and competitor targets — you can add some shorter tail keywords that are a little bit more competitive. 

 25:02

If you do have a brand registry, we recommend you split sponsored product and sponsored brands more evenly, even though sponsored brands is a little more expensive and has higher CPC as it tends to get more visibility. 

 25:16

We also recommend within those sponsored brand ads to use both of the video ad types if you have them. There’s the sponsored brand or video product collection style that points to your storefront. 

 25:31

Those allow both horizontal and vertical videos, which are pretty new, but are performing pretty well. There’s also the sponsored brand video ads that direct to a PDP that show up in a completely different placement. They still have good return on investment. 

 25:58

Definitely utilize both of them because it’s going to give you as much space as possible. Finally, increase spend on sponsored display as well, particularly adding competitors — and a lot of people forget that you should also do compliments. 

 26:16

Think about it as if you’re selling dog toys. Bid on dog beds, dog bowls, leashes, other things that people that like your products might also be in the market for. It’s a good, sneaky way to get in more impressions and more views without having to go directly after competitors. 

Marissa

 26:38

Thank you, Brianne. And now the big money area. Doug, take us away with some DSP areas for this.

Doug

 26:44

Sure thing. Obviously, more budget opportunities become available to you — including the DSP. These strategies are on top of the strategies I mentioned earlier. 

 26:54

Focus on options like brand, product, and Disney Plus. There’s quite a few. It’s not critical to leverage all of these — you want to make sure that you’re not diluting your budget significantly by adding too many upper funnel strategies, but there are plenty of options available to you. 

 27:25

It’s also important to note that while all these upper funnel opportunities are available at this spend level, you only want to use it during the lead in period. During the event itself, it’s not critical to use these upper funnel strategies as you’re closer to the point of purchase. 

 27:38

These strategies are typically earlier in a consideration journey. Think about focusing during the event itself on those lower funnel strategies such as contextual and retargeting, which do require a spend. 

Marissa

 27:50

That’s a very good point, Doug. Thank you so much. Now, we’re going to look at how to expand to Walmart and other marketplaces by looking at the key differences between Amazon and Walmart platforms. 

 27:59

Lily, can you take us away there? 

Lily

 28:01

A few high level key differences between the two platforms is that Walmart is known for its transparent fee structure for sellers. Compared to Amazon, there’s less retail related fees. 

 28:15

Amazon’s added a plethora of fees in the last year or so, but historically Walmart has a much more simple fee structure. They also do not have as competitive of a house brand as Amazon. Across most categories, the top competitor for sellers is Amazon’s brand and on Walmart, you do not see that as the case most of the time. 

 28:39

Walmart’s ad platform in general is a simple version compared to Amazon’s. There’s a lot of similarities, but a little bit less complex on Walmart. 

 28:54

Okay, let’s talk about the ad types. 

 29:00

Let’s get a bit more granular — starting with the ad types for sponsored product. These are the main differences. On Walmart, there’s no negative targeting. You have your exact phrase broad match. 

 29:16

On Amazon, you have negative targeting and ASIN brand negative targets as well. That’s not the case on Walmart. You also don’t have Pat or category targeting for sponsored product on Walmart. 

 29:29

Walmart will auto select the PDPs to target based on the keywords that you’ve selected for your campaign and your product, whereas Amazon allows you to specifically choose ASINs and PDPs and categories to target. 

 29:45

For a bidding strategy difference, Walmart only has fixed bids and that’s auto. Auto sets the bid by product, whereas on Amazon, Amazon offers dynamic bids down, dynamic bids up and down, and fixed bids as well — and auto sets a default bid by the ad group or the targeting type. 

 30:07

For placement multipliers on Walmart, there’s a few additional placement multipliers as well as device multipliers, whereas on Amazon, you have your top of search PDP and rest of search multiplier options. 

 30:20

Moving on to sponsored brand. On Walmart, sponsored brand is a premium advertising feature and it’s only available to the brand owners. On Amazon, it’s available to any seller and the brand can give those sellers certain rights and permissions to participate in sponsored brand ads, but on Walmart, you have to be the brand to participate in sponsored brand advertising. 

 30:44

Finally, sponsored display is not currently available on Walmart. Audience targeting is solely done on Walmart through the traditional DSP route, whereas on Amazon, we have an additional sponsored placement with display and audience targeting, and you have DSP in addition to display on Amazon. 

Marissa

 31:07

Thank you. This was super helpful. I actually had no idea that Walmart did not have display. Social media is huge right now. This can also help with your ad campaigns. 

 31:21

TikTok is always in the news, as we know. We’ve also got Pinterest entering the mix here, which now allows for Amazon ads, where you can go directly to the product and sell through there. We also have influencers like Amazon Live. 

 31:33

Instagram is huge. Meta and Amazon have this awesome deal where, again, the links are directly there. We have the top gift opportunities. Let’s talk more about some of these survey stats that we have from our brand survey, Lily, if you want to go through. 

Lily

 31:53

Here are some stats from our brand survey in terms of social. As Amazon and Walmart grow as dominant sales channels, Instagram and TikTok are also growing along with it. Instagram share rose from 20% to 30% and TikTok’s rose from 18% to 26%. 

 32:11

We see significant growth on these social platforms. 43% of brands leverage social media channels to run promotions and 44% of brands use social media to expand to new audiences. Like Marissa mentioned, there’s influencer marketing through Amazon Live as well. 

 32:32

These are all different ways to leverage social and drive traffic to your brand pages and your PDPs as well. 

Marissa

 32:43

Awesome. Now, we’ll take a quick look at preparing for post -holiday campaigns because your job is not done once you’re over with the holidays. Lily will explain a little bit more about that as we do have some tips here for transitioning from the holiday with Q5, which is exciting. 

 32:58

What is Q5, Lily? 

Lilu

 33:01

We say to watch out for Q5 — the post -holiday period where people shop for themselves. It’s often marked by lower media costs and overall cost efficiencies, and 41% of shoppers say that their shopping doesn’t stop in December and doesn’t stop after the holidays. They use that time to buy what they want for themselves or what they didn’t get gifted through the holidays. 

 33:30

While Q5 is relevant for businesses of all sizes, smaller companies in particular are finding that this is a time to take advantage of and get creative when there’s a less competition and ttraffic, but still some relevance there for them. 

 33:51

Electronics, home and garden are top categories in this Q5 period. Remember to allocate budget for this time on a much smaller scale, but you don’t want your campaigns to go dark and you want to take advantage of this last push of traffic for the year. 

Marissa

 34:07

Thank you. What about DSP? How can we capitalize on sales data for future campaigns there? 

Doug

 34:14

Exiting the tentpole events and returning to your evergreen spend is a little bit different when it’s post holiday, compared to just exiting out of an event itself. While lead out is not typically a strategy we think about during what we’re calling T5, that is definitely when you want to start focusing your DSP spend on your lower funnel strategies. 

 34:32

Going back to the product retargeting event. Again, these are users who’ve indicated they’re more likely to buy your products because they’ve been to your pages and your brand store, added your item to their cart — that’s an expressed interest in your products. 

 34:46

If they did not purchase it during the holiday, or they have a gift card now, they’re able to make that purchase. It’s especially true as customers are no longer buying products for others, and it could potentially unlock the ability to purchase a product for themselves. 

 34:58

Abandoned cart retargeting is inherently smaller. These are users who have not just been to your page, but added an item to their cart. Therefore, it requires less spend. We typically see about a 75% 25% budget allocation between product retargeting, which is people who visited your page, and abandoned cart retargeting, which is people who have added your item to their cart but have not purchased. 

 35:17

If you do find that you’re not able to deliver your budget in full during this period, especially towards abandoned cart retargeting, contextual is always there. With decreased traffic and lower competition, the cost should be lower and there should be more in order for you to deliver to. 

 35:32

Similar to what Brianne mentioned before about complementary products or complimenting keywords — this is a great opportunity to attach yourself to another product that somebody may have been gifted or purchased during the holiday, and is able to purchase themselves. 

 35:44

If you’re purchasing a television and you want to purchase a soundbar as a complementary product, there’s great affinity there between those two. 

 35:53

During this period, success in the DSP is largely measured in detail page rate and cost per detail page view as it’s not normally sales driven. A lot of the conversions we see typically get attributed to sponsored as the platform is last touch last click, and there is the duplication. 

 36:09

We mentioned before that the DSP is complementary to foundational sponsored campaigns. Your goal here is to help sponsored convert those users who are more engaged in searching for keywords and searching for products that they might not have been gifted and are ready to purchase for themselves. 

Marissa

 36:24

Thank you so much, Doug. We really appreciate that. Thank you all for your expertise and sharing your tips with us here. I do have some final remarks for everybody. We do have our part three: our final webinar in this holiday prep series, which is going to be focusing on pricing strategies to maximize holiday sales with our very own CEO, Victor Rosenman. 

 36:43

We’re very excited for that. We’ll have invites going out to your inboxes, and we’ll have it up on our landing page. We do have our week by week Q4 prep timeline over here. You can take a screenshot there to take you directly to the infographic page, which will give you more insights and also additional inventory, advertising, and pricing tips, too. 

 37:04

We do have a 14 -day free trial of our advertising optimization platform. While these folks over here are on our managed services or brand services team, we have that option as well. 

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We’re very excited for everybody here. Please feel free to reach out with any questions. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Again, thanks for coming!