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.
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Why an identity framework matters more than any single identifier The challenge facing marketers today isn’t a single identifier on a deprecation timeline. It’s the increasing fragmentation of signals and identifiers across browsers, devices, apps, and platforms. This shift introduces complexity into how audiences are reached and measured, as signals behave differently in every environment, and it becomes more complex to piece together a complete view of the consumer. Each environment contributes to its own set of visibility gaps, making identity less predictable and more uneven. The result is a patchwork of inconsistent identity signals rather than a single, predictable decline. While you can’t control how platforms evolve, you can control how you respond to fragmentation. The future won’t be defined by the loss of any single identifier, but by your ability to unify, interpret, and activate the many signals that remain. Marketers who adopt a flexible, identity framework will be best positioned to create consistency in an otherwise fragmented landscape. At Experian, we believe flexibility starts with intelligence. For decades, we’ve used AI and machine learning to help marketers understand people’s behavior more clearly, respect their privacy, and deliver messages that drive business outcomes. Our technology brings identity, insight, and intelligence together, so even as the number of signals grows and becomes more varied across environments, marketers can reach the right people with relevance, respect, and simplicity. This intelligence acts as the connective tissue across fragmented ecosystems, ensuring marketers can recognize and reach audiences consistently wherever they appear. What forces are driving fragmentation in identity and signals? Changes to traditional IDs: Since Apple introduced ATT, access to IDFA has become inconsistent across apps and devices. Google’s evolving Android privacy roadmap adds another layer of variability, fragmenting mobile addressability. Safari and Firefox have long restricted third-party cookies, while Chrome continues to support them for now. This creates different signal availability across browsers, contributing to an uneven and increasingly fragmented identity landscape on the open web. Shifts in signals: IPv4 to IPv6 migration introduces mismatched identity structures that complicate continuity across environments. Platform-driven fragmentation: Closed ecosystems and uneven adoption of evolving RTB standards (like OpenRTB 2.6 updates designed to support new identifiers and consent signals) create differences in which identifiers and consent signals are shared in the bidstream. At the same time, the rise of alternative or “universal” IDs—often developed by individual platforms, publishers, or technology companies—means that multiple ID types can appear within the same auction, each with its own structure, rules, and level of support. These differences reduce interoperability across platforms and contribute to a more fragmented activation landscape. Each change creates an identity silo. Together, they form an ecosystem defined by fragmentation rather than absence. Without an identity framework, these environments operate as disconnected identity islands. A multi-ID world requires a unified identity framework Alternative IDs play an important role, but they also expand the number of signals marketers must reconcile. Without a consistent identity layer, more IDs often mean more complexity—not more clarity. Common alternative IDs in use today: UID2: The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, an iteration of their original Unified ID 1.0, which was still reliant on third-party cookies, creates persistent IDs with user-provided email addresses and phone numbers. ID5: This independent identity provider builds an identity infrastructure that powers addressable advertising across channels. It can create an ID based on both deterministic and probabilistic data. Hadron ID: Hadron ID is a unique, interoperable identity system (including first-party, audience-based, contextual, deterministic, and probabilistic) developed by Audigent, now part of Experian, to drive revenue for publishers by making their audience data and inventory actionable for media buyers. Industry reports suggest roughly one-third to two-fifths of open-auction traffic carries alternative IDs, sometimes multiple per request. Among Experian clients, adoption of alternative IDs rose 50% year over year, with a 30% increase in IDs resolved to individuals via our Digital Graph. Identity isn’t disappearing; it’s multiplying. A modern identity framework resolves these identifiers into a single, privacy-safe consumer view.