5 essential technical tips to get your holiday advertising right

We don’t need to tell you that the last months of the year, from Black Friday through Christmas, are an unmissable opportunity for retail and e-commerce businesses. And with Black Friday just about a month away, you should already be in full swing with your advertising. But if you’re still working on your ads strategy and set-up, here are some tips on what to make sure you take care of on the technical side.

Whether or not your business is selling products online, setting up certain technical integrations will ensure you don’t miss any opportunities and are able to make the most of your advertising investment all throughout the holiday selling season.

Let’s get technical!

1. CHECK YOUR SITE SPEED

When it comes to online transactions, a slow site can kill your chances of a sale—whether that sale is online or in a physical store later on. One study found that 47% of online consumers expect a page to load within 2 seconds or less, and 40% of them will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In another study, 46% of shoppers said they’ll never return to a slow website. During the high-traffic period around Black Friday, it’s even more essential to have your website up to speed.

For image-heavy websites, use a tool like Compressor.io to cut down on load times. For a greater overview of the issues that need addressing to improve site speed, there are a host of website optimization tools out there that can analyze your site and provide areas for improvement.

2. OPTIMIZE FOR MOBILE

As of the first quarter of 2019, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 48.7 percent of global website traffic, so your website must be designed with mobile in mind. According to Google, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site that was difficult to access and 40% reported that they visit a competitor’s site instead.

And during the holiday season specifically, mobile is key. Mobile e-commerce sales increased by 32.6 percent in 2018, which accounted for 44 percent of all holiday e-commerce sales. On Cyber Monday 2018, mobile devices were responsible for 54.3 percent of all visits to retail sites.

Review the experience of your website when accessed via a smartphone. Is it easy to navigate? Does the experience leave you satisfied or frustrated? With your online advertising goals in mind, make adjustments to your website to improve mobile user experience before you launch your campaigns from Black Friday to Christmas.

3. SET UP YOUR PIXELS AND TAGS

To accurately analyze your performances and effectively retarget people who have shown interest during your Black Friday and Christmas campaigns, you’ll need to install small snippets of code on select pages of your website. These are called “pixels” or “tags” depending on the network, and are essential to remarket effectively to contacts you’ve already engaged with.

For a step-by-step guide on setting up the pixel on Facebook and making the most of the insights you can get from it, download our complete guide.

4. SET UP STANDARD AND AND CUSTOM EVENTS

Once your pixels and tags are correctly set up, make sure you configure the standard and custom events that you want to measure. What sort of actions show that a particular prospect is valuable to your business? What information could you use to create contextual remarketing ads that have a higher chance of converting? It could be “add to cart” or “add to wishlist,” or perhaps it’s something to suit your particular business model which can be created using a custom event.

5. MAKE SURE YOUR PRODUCT FEED IS UP TO DATE

Take the time to make sure your product feed is updated with all the products you’ll be promoting over the holiday sales season. Ensure they are all there and have the right prices, for example. Taking the time to do this work now will save you time later on!

An up-to-date product feed is important for all kinds of businesses, including ones with physical stores. To help you get the most out of your online ads to drive offline sales, including how to set up your product catalog, we wrote an e-book with our partner Lengow.

Need some help?

We know the holiday rush can be a lot to manage, and making sure everything from your technical set-up to optimizing your ads is done right can be overwhelming. Never fear: Paragone Managed Service can be your secret weapon to making this holiday season your best ever!

Our Managed Service team is made up of performance marketing experts who manage the online advertising campaigns for our clients from A to Z with the help of our cutting-edge platform. From strategy, to implementation, to optimization and reporting, our clients trust us to consistently achieve their objectives. The best part is that we offer flexible engagements, so you can choose to rely on Managed Service for a set period of time to get you through the seasonal rush.

Learn more about Paragone Managed Service for your holiday ads.