This holiday shopping season, marketers will look to take advantage of the surge in spending across channels like connected TV (CTV), programmatic, and mobile. Despite challenges such as privacy regulations and Google’s new cookie deprecation plan, this moment presents a unique opportunity for marketers to reshape their traditional approaches to consumer engagement and capitalize on these changes.
As we approach the holiday season, understanding how consumers spend, where they shop, and how their shopping habits are changing are key components to consider when crafting your holiday advertising campaigns. Our 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report utilizes our expertise in data and insights to highlight emerging consumer behaviors and spending patterns. In our report, we share what these trends mean for marketers and how Experian can help, so you can refine your messaging and target the right audience through the best channels.
In this blog post, we cover three insights from our report. Watch our video for a recap below.
1. Consumers are shopping evenly throughout the holiday season
35% of holiday shopping was done in December, peaking at 9% of total holiday sales the week before Christmas. Cyber Week, the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, and the week before Christmas brought the highest weekly sales for the past two holiday seasons.
What this means for marketers
Prepare for an extended promotional period. Schedule your marketing campaigns and sales initiatives to maximize impact during the extended season, focusing on the peaks of Cyber Week and the week before Christmas.
How Experian can help you target these shoppers
Experian’s data, ranked #1 in accuracy by Truthset, offers advertisers the ability to reach people based on demographic, geographic, and behavioral attributes (e.g. websites visited and purchase history). Our audiences are available on-the-shelf of most major platforms, making it easy for you to activate and target holiday shoppers.
We recently released 19 new holiday-focused audience segments. Here are a few you can activate:
- Black Friday Shoppers
- Cyber Monday Shoppers
- Big Box/Club Store Shoppers
- Luxury Gift Shoppers
- Discount Holiday Shoppers
- Holiday Airline Travel
2. Online shopping is leveling out
Online holiday spending continues to remain around a third of all holiday shopping spending.
We are starting to see online shopping slow and level out – people are going back in-store. The high amount of online shopping we saw during the pandemic is starting to return to pre-pandemic behaviors.
Consumers are spending more in-store at department and discount stores but are shopping online for office/electronics/games, mass retailers, and apparel.
- 84% of holiday shopping was done in-store for discount stores.
- 79% of holiday shopping was done in-store for department stores.
- 64% of holiday shopping was done online for office, electronics, and games stores.
What this means for marketers
Digital and physical experiences work together. Retailers should have a multi-channel plan to reach consumers, tailoring their approach to their target audience and product and creating engaging in-store experiences to drive visitors.
How Experian can help you target and measure across channels
We connect online and offline data to enable precise targeting and measurement of marketing efforts across multiple channels. Read our case study with Cuebiq to learn how they used our Activity Feed solution to deliver in-store lift analyses to their clients.
3. CTV is the top channel to reach consumers
Over two-thirds of the U.S. population now use CTV, and the average time spent among adults is expected to surpass two hours per day in 2024. CTV offers a creative ad experience similar to its linear counterpart but provides more sophisticated targeting and analytics capabilities.
What this means for marketers
As CTV viewing continues to dominate, the importance of cross-device targeting and measurement increases.
How Experian can help you reach shoppers across devices
Later this year, we’ll add support for IPv6 in our Digital Graph as well as phone-based UID2s. This is in addition to our current coverage of IPv4 and email-based UID2s. As a result, all IP signals and UID2s will be resolved back to Experian’s household and individual profiles and their associated devices, which means marketers and platforms can better understand the full customer journey and reach people across their devices.
Download our 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report
This holiday season is about more than just transactions – it’s about cultivating meaningful connections with your audience. Download our 2024 Holiday spending trends and insights report to access all of our predictions for this year’s holiday season.
When you work with Experian for your holiday shopping campaigns, you’re getting:
- Accurate consumer insights: Better understand your customers’ behavioral and demographic attributes with our #1 ranked data covering the full U.S. population.
- Signal-agnostic identity solutions: Our deep understanding of people in the offline and digital worlds provides you a persistent linkage of personally identifiable information (PII) data and digital IDs, ensuring you accurate cross-device targeting, addressability and measurement.
- Secure connectivity: Bring data and identity to life in a way that meets your needs by securely sharing data between partners, utilizing the integrations we have across the ecosystem, and using our marketing data in flexible ways.
Make the most of this holiday shopping season with Experian. Contact us today to get started.
Latest posts
If the time spent on the Internet for personal computers was distilled into an hour then 27 percent of it would be spent on social networking and forums across the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. In the U.S., 16 minutes out of every hour online is spent on social networking and forums, nine minutes on entertainment sites and five minutes shopping. Global comparison In the UK, 13 minutes out of every hour online is spent on social networking and forums, nine minutes on entertainment sites and six minutes shopping. Australian Internet users spend 14 minutes on social sites, nine on entertainment and four minutes shopping online. Across all three markets, time spent shopping online grew year-over-year, but the UK market emerged as having the most prolific online shoppers, spending proportionally more time on retail Websites than online users in the U.S. or Australia. British Internet users spent 10 percent of all time online shopping in 2012, compared to nine percent in the U.S. and six percent in Australia. This was in part due to a bumper winter holiday season in the UK where 370 million hours were spent shopping online, 24 percent higher than the monthly average. Consumption of news content also increased across all three markets with Australian users emerging as the most voracious consumers of news online. Six percent of all time spent online in Australia in 2012 was on a news Website, compared to five percent in the UK and four percent in the U.S. Meanwhile, the time spent on social media proportionate to other online activities declined across all three regions. The U.S., which has been the most dominant market for social media consumption in the last three years dropped from 30 percent of all time spent online to 27 percent. In Australia time spent on social dropped from 27 percent to 24 percent while in the UK it dipped from 25 percent to 22 percent year-over-year. This highlights the rise in access via 3G and 4G networks as consumers spend increasingly more time online while on the move. "Understanding consumer behavior across channels is more important than ever as more visits are being made on the move, particularly among social networking and email,” says Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services. "With smartphones and tablets becoming more powerful, our data clearly indicates the difference between mobile and traditional desktop usage further enabling the ‘always on’ consumer mentality. Marketers need to understand these differences, as well as regionally, to ensure campaigns can be tailored for better and more effective engagement.” Mobile browsing When looking at the U.S. browsing data for mobile devices, email accounted for the largest time spent on average, for the same categories for Q1 2013. Email made up 23 percent of time spent on mobile devices for Q1-13, while social networking accounted for 15 percent. Entertainment had the third highest time spent with 13 percent, followed by shopping with 11 percent and travel with 9 percent. The mobile data does not include app usage, but does include mobile browsing within an app. Read more of the latest consumer trends in The 2013 Digital Marketer Report Learn more about consumer online behavior by visiting our Online Trends page Learn more about the author, Matt Tatham
The generation of 18- to 34-year-olds known as millennials is an increasingly influential group that impacts many aspects of the American lifestyle, including fashion, technology, entertainment and beyond.
What marketers need in order to lay the groundwork for success in their online advertising campaigns.