Prepare for the Q4 Holiday Season: Paid Social Tests to Consider

The holidays might still seem far away, but ‘tis the season for Q4 holiday planning, especially for advertising strategies that take a bit more advance lead time. To fully realize Q4 revenue potential across paid social channels, consider these five holiday strategies.

1. Holiday-Specific Audience Seed Lists

It happens frequently that the user base that purchases during the holidays looks a bit different from the typical purchaser the rest of the year. Leverage those differences both in remarketing and prospecting. Upload a list of only last year’s holiday purchasers – depending on volume, either all Q4 purchasers, all holiday window (Thanksgiving – Cyber Week), or all Cyber Week purchasers. Using that seed list to generate lookalikes will allow for holiday prospecting dollars to focus in on likely Q4 purchasers specifically.

2. Gifting-Focused Product Sets

Holiday shoppers are looking for item a bit differently than evergreen shoppers – during the holidays, people can be more sensitive to price, more wooed by quick shipping, and, of course, are looking to purchase items not for themselves. With that in mind, curate product sets of the most gift-able items possible, and test those across any dynamic audience.

3. Secondary Demographic Targeting

Do you have a pretty well-defined demographic audience? Many accounts do, to the point where you might be excluding certain demographic profiles (gender, age, parental status, etc.). Consider actively targeting that secondary market, as they’re frequently the primary gifters for your target audience. Create ad sets specifically targeting the secondary demo, and pair that with gifting-focused language and a curated ad of your bestsellers to present this audience with items that will be the most appealing gifts.

4. SEM-Informed Product Strategy

Without actively testing product sets, you can’t see what type of product resonates better with users, and even then you don’t have insight into exact product performance. SEM, on the other hand, absolutely does. Use category and item ID data from shopping campaigns, particularly in conjunction with the associated search query data, to build prospecting product sets of your top performers. Why show the whole catalog when you can show your top 100 items that you know already drive the highest return with your audience?

5. Email Lead Gen for Nurture Programs

The ad space gets crowded and expensive during the holidays, and while those premiums can pay off with higher conversion rates, you should also nurture these users via other channels. Consider running a lead gen campaign for email addresses against some of your most valuable prospecting audiences. That will allow you to be one step ahead of many competitors and fold those users into your email nurture program earlier on in the core shopping season.

The Q4 revenue potential is typically far higher than only advertising to the core audience you see perform throughout the rest of the year. Think critically about who else might be interested in a holiday purchase, and how you can snag the attention of an audience now, before ad and promo saturation really start to heat up. Need help? Feel free to contact our paid social team to ensure your holiday management is in tip top shape!