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Three consumer spending trends for the 2024 holiday season

Published: August 6, 2024 by Hayley Schneider

Three insights on consumer spending trends for 2024.

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.

Holiday season weekly spending trends

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.

Holiday sales by year: online and brick and mortar

Consumers are spending more in-store at department and discount stores but are shopping online for office/electronics/games, mass retailers, and apparel.

Holiday sales by channel and product category
  • 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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Tapad launches global privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies

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Feb 09,2021 by Experian Marketing Services

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By providing this translation layer, Tapad will take on the responsibility of encryption and decryption protocols where applicable, which will deliver added functionality to our customers.  Tapad + Experian partners at launch: Use cases Resolve existing first-party data with new cookieless solutions through The Tapad Graph to minimize data loss Frequency cap at the Individual and Household level via Cookieless and traditional ID Reach consumers at scale across all touchpoints and IDs   Build a more inclusive and holistic view of the consumer journey Run accurate and scalable measurement before and after the formal deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome Map online data into offline activities  Hear why industry leaders are adapting with Tapad + Experian As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, a part of Experian, on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers. 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Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players.  — Pierre Diennet | Global Partnerships | Lotame   At this pivotal moment in the industry, we are excited to be partnering with Tapad, a part of Experian on their cookieless initiative and making Retargetly IDx available into the Switchboard solution, providing global brands, platforms and publishers with a compliant, cookieless ID solution for the Latin American market; enabling them to target, reach and measure users at scale through the region.  — Daniel Czaplinski | CEO and Co-Founder | Retargetly   With Audigent’s Halo ID, we’re architecting a cookieless future where clients and partners have confidence in the actionability and interoperability of exclusive 1st party audiences, originated from some of the world’s leading publishers and creators. We see collaboration as being critical to a collective understanding of identity and Tapad, a part of Experian as a trusted partner with solutions such as Switchboard to support continuity for marketers’ addressability.  — Drew Stein | CEO and Founder | Audigent   Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5’s cookie-less IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie.  — Mathieu Roche | CEO and Co-Founder | ID5   Addressing the current identity challenge requires transparency and collaboration. We are pleased to align ShareThis data with Tapad + Experian’s growing ecosystem. ShareThis data helps marketers evolve beyond the cookie to complete the picture. 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Feb 09,2021 by Experian Marketing Services

Hashed email onboarding: offline to online connectivity

With the emergence of email addresses as a currency for brands to communicate with their consumers offline; attaching email data to in-store purchases lays the groundwork for future advertising strategies. However, this advantage in having an additional digital touchpoint also creates a new challenge for marketers. How do they connect what they know about their customers via offline data and PII, or personally identifiable information, with what they want to know about their online behaviors and interactions? Taken a step further, how can they create actionable strategies that connect these two streams of consumer insights in order to drive them to make more future purchases; and even become loyalists? At a time when the shift from traditional to online shopping feels more like a landslide; connecting online and offline data has never been more valuable or more urgent. The solution for these marketers lies in the framework of identity resolution; and a key capability called hashed email onboarding. Hashed email onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers. The methodology prevents the consumers actual email address from being readable; while still providing marketers a connection between those emails and other touchpoints for an individual. Instead of understanding the customer journey in two distinct parts; how they interact with a brand or company offline and separately how they interact with a brand online; hashed email onboarding allows for the two parts to be woven together in a holistic view of that consumer. The power of connecting these data sets can be seen when combining offline and online attribution and measurement to improve frequency capping and look-alike modeling. It’s important to note that not all identity resolution vendors that onboard hashed emails function in the same way or provide the same level of data. Some connect only to desktop or only to mobile devices; while others don’t actually make direct linkages at all- they simply provide the hashed emails as a targetable digital audience for upload. While hashed email onboarding and the connection between offline and online data is a powerful strategy; it needs to be as structured as possible across the most data available to reveal truly efficient targeting and measurement strategies. Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get started with The Tapad Graph   For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today! 

Jan 25,2021 by Experian Marketing Services

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