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
Spring is here! For some of us, spring means the return of warm weather, for others it signals a time to clean out the clutter or, a time for more outdoor activities. Successful marketers know that just as spring habits vary, so do seasonal buying patterns. Marketers should take advantage of advanced marketing tools to capitalize on consumer spending around the changing seasons. There are three areas that will help you deliver the most value to your customers throughout the year: preference data, message relevancy, and a mobile-first approach. Preference data Spring is a great time to gather preference data as “spring cleaning” inspires consumers to research and purchase new items as they begin purge their closets of last season’s look. Collecting information from your customers about the types of products they are interested in will enable you to accurately tailor the content you send them through the remainder of the warm weather seasons. Message relevancy Differences in climate and culture affect style preferences from city to city. To give your customers a tailored experience, use their preference data to delivery personalized content and product suggestions. By using dynamic content tools and filters in your marketing automation platform, you can be sure the right content is presented at the right time, to different audiences within the same campaign. Personalizing your communication shows your customers that you understand their needs and preferences, builds brand trust, and long-term loyalty. Mobile first With the thaw of winter, spring inspires activity and productivity – with so much to do, your customers have more reasons to be on the go. This is the perfect time of year to scale up your mobile PUSH and SMS campaigns to reach consumers wherever they are. Consider adding triggers based on location data from visits to your mobile app or visits to your site from a mobile browser. Triggering a message to your customers while they’re near your store is a powerful way to drive relevant messaging and purchase intent. Focusing on these three core areas will help you deliver the most value to your customers through the season and throughout the year. Learn more about how our team of experts can help with comprehensive marketing strategies that will take your marketing to the next level.
Partnership leverages industry-leading Tapad Device Graph™ for more effective video marketing across all connected devices NEW YORK, April 11, 2017 /PRNewswire/ – Tapad, a part of Experian, the leading provider of privacy-safe, cross-device marketing technology solutions, has announced its partnership with Innovid, the world's leading video marketing platform. This integration enables Innovid to bring cross-device personalization and a more unified viewer experience to its video marketing clients including Bank of America, L'Oréal, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble. Innovid's proprietary technology is the only platform optimized for video, enabling marketers to thrive in an ever-changing digital television landscape. Since its launch last year, Innovid's Marketing Cloud Suite has helped marketers increase message relevance and the opportunity to drive conversions, retention and acquisition through video personalization. By leveraging the Tapad Device GraphTM, Innovid's marketers can now benefit from the ability to drive consistent, personalized user experiences across all devices, creating more impactful connections with consumers and increasing ROI. "Personalization is a must for every data-driven marketer and really needs to happen across all devices to ensure a unified customer journey," says Ronnie Lavi, SVP of product at Innovid. "At Innovid, we recognize one size does not fit all when it comes to video. As an open platform, we are always looking to add best-of-breed capabilities through integrations and partnerships, and we've chosen Tapad because of its superior cross-device expertise." "Innovid has long paved the way for effective personalization in the video marketing space," says Pierre Martensson, GM of Tapad's data division. "As video continues to gain popularity across digital formats, we're excited to see how our technology empowers Innovid to bring that renowned personalization to more customers across all of their devices." Contact us today!
Tracey Scheppach's new marketing and media practice leverages Tapad's device-level data to help clients achieve "marketing nirvana" NEW YORK and CHICAGO, April 5, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Today, Tapad, now part of Experian, is the leading provider of unified, cross-screen marketing technology solutions, and Matter More, a next generation marketing and media practice with deep experience in the advanced TV space, announced a strategic partnership to bring together world class digital data and audience development expertise to help marketers improve how they connect with consumers. As consumer behavior continues to expand across multiple devices, today's marketers need robust, comprehensive data solutions to accurately engage the people who matter most to their brands. At the same time, the TV industry has reached an advertising tipping point, capitalizing on the power of device-level data. "Achieving unduplicated reach and frequency across all channels with true addressability, and the ability to measure outcomes, is marketing nirvana," says Tracey Scheppach, CEO and co-founder of Matter More, a new agency built for the modern age. "The best opportunity to deliver 'marketing nirvana,' at scale, is by partnering with Tapad and using their world-class Device Graph to help our clients simply matter more to the people they care about most." "By leveraging our access to rich TV data, we can now measure the actual performance of media across channels," says Marshall Wong, SVP, TV for Tapad. Tapad's proprietary Device Graph™ unifies consumer behavior data across all devices, uncovering the interests, passions and behaviors of the audiences who matter most. As with any data solution, privacy, transparency and trust are crucial to bringing marketers a solid offering that delivers results. "Tapad is excited to partner with Matter More to tap into their knowledge base and experience working with some of the largest brands on TV today," says Kate O'Loughlin, SVP and GM of Tapad's media division. "The time has come to truly unleash the power of device-level data at scale." Contact us today