In a year of unexpected and unprecedented changes, planning can seem like an almost impossible task. However, with the festive season on the horizon, for an eCommerce business doing so is imperative.
According to Google’s research into the 2019 holiday season, 38% of Christmas shopping was completed before Black Friday week even began! This insight, coupled with the IMRG‘s warning that customers should buy early for online Christmas gifts, means that being present where your customers are and prepared for their visit has never been more critical.
Maximising your products’ visibility in Google Search, Facebook and Instagram while better understanding past website performance around the festive period will ensure that this year is a success for your business. Therefore, we highly recommend you look into the following areas:
Google research found that 86% of purchases in the 2019 holiday season were made by shoppers who carried out an online search beforehand. And with Google Shopping long seen as a big growth opportunity for most online retailers, maximising the number of active products available to Google is crucial. If product feed errors are left unchecked, this will lead to Ad removal, which, in turn, will lead to lost product visibility during a crucial period of the year.
We highly recommend proactively analysing and addressing all product feed fields that don’t comply with Google and Facebook’s specifications to ensure you maximise your products’ visibility across these platforms and keep them making money.
Over the years, Google Analytics has introduced a range of in-depth Ecommerce specific reports to their platform that provide pivotal intelligence into product, basket and checkout performance. Understanding these areas of your website better will help you to know what worked and what didn’t, guiding your plans for the following year.
However, if you haven’t set these reports up yet or they have been set up incorrectly, then you will lose valuable insight that could shape your activity for the coming years.
Setting up Enhanced Ecommerce reports in Google Analytics will give you the insight you need to make next year’s festive season even more of a success.
Learning from last year’s success can aid you in preparing better for this year. But don’t stop there, learn from the year before as well.
Analysing category, product, basket and checkout performance over the past two years will you help you to discover trends and patterns that you could potentially repeat or improve upon this year.
If you don’t have the time or resource to address these areas over the coming weeks, we can do it for you. If you want to know more about how we can help, get in touch, and we can organise a call to go into more detail. We already have clients booking up our team’s resource, so the sooner you let us know, the better.
