Last holiday season, a number of Nanigans ecommerce customers were actively managing Instagram campaigns following the company’s API launch in August. These early adopters of Instagram ads saw substantial performance gains once the 2015 holiday shopping season began in earnest.

The Opportunity For Increased Retail Advertising Revenue

Nanigans’ top 5 highest spending ecommerce advertisers between September and December 2015 experienced the following average changes between September/October vs. November/December, weighted based on advertiser-specific Instagram spend over the study period.

+270%

1-Day Click To Purchase

28%

Cost Per Action

+136%

Ad Spend

Particularly for ecommerce advertisers targeting user groups who skew more towards the 18-29 demographic, Instagram should be a major consideration for driving additional purchases at scale during the 2016 holiday season. To give you a solid foundation for Q4 success on Instagram and other paid social channels like Facebook and Twitter, we’ve rounded up some strategic recommendations:

10 Tips For Maximizing The Holiday Shopping Season

1. Start acquiring your remarketing groups early and make sure you place a retargeting pixel on all of your landing pages.

2. Rather than relying too heavily on clicks and CPA, leverage predictive lifetime value to understand the quality of your customers as well as their purchasing power.

3. Target last year’s top purchasers and build lookalikes from these user groups to expand reach.

4. Focus on imagery regardless of whether your campaign is on desktop or on mobile. Beautiful images of products or people can be presented in a variety of ways to attract eyeballs and drive clicks.

5. Frontload your holiday advertising budgets and increase them accordingly to avoid price inflation from heightened demand for advertising inventory during the holiday shopping season.

6. Create a sense of urgency for shoppers by offering a week-long cascade of discounts, flash sales, and other promotions.

7. Deliver a more personalized message that drives a higher response rate by leveraging the full context around a customer’s location such as language, country, city, state, town, and zip.

8. If you have a mobile app, consider updating it to include robust product search capabilities, targeted push notifications to support promotional campaigns, store location information, and a simple checkout process. If possible, integrate your app into the store experience with the ability to scan bar and QR codes, use mobile coupons, redeem offers, participate in loyalty programs and make payments. In MAI advertising campaigns, emphasize ease of use and guide shoppers through the user experience.

9. Program relevant or related messages on multiple platforms including online, TV, and print.

10. The final week of December can account for 1% of the month’s sales, and the day after Christmas is one of the biggest shopping days of the year for some retailers. Don’t forget to factor post-holiday sales into your holiday advertising strategy.