Lets Get Ready for the Shopping Season!
By Laetitia Fischer Jessner
Online retailers and marketplaces generate their best results of the year during Black Friday.
It’s also the period of the year during which the competition is at its strongest.
Sponsored products are a win-win-win way to: 1-maximize the earnings for the marketplace and the sellers thanks to the higher visibility and 2- give the consumers a better experience by seeing the best and most relevant products first (assuming that the big brands and best products will take their part).
In this article we will first recap last year’s Black Friday results and second, share some best practices to prepare and maximize the revenue during this shopping season.
Results from Black Friday 2021 Sponsored products
Here are some example of the KPIs changes we have seen in some leading marketplaces worldwide during BF:
Some marketplaces gave more space to the sponsored ads during the shopping season by adding more slots. As an example: instead of showing the sponsored products on slots 1/3/5/6/12/15 they also showed them on positions 2/4. Here were the results of the additional slots on average:
We recommend that all retailers follow this best practice. Indeed, as competition is exploding during Black Friday and the Shopping season, adding slots to your sponsored products enables the supply to get in line with the increased demand. It will help you maximize the results and your sellers to get more visibility and enjoy the benefits of the shopping season.
Here are a few more best practices for the Shopping Season and its preparation
Make sure the advertisers have enough budget and stock to catch all the quick wins!
Unfortunately, during Black Friday 2021 we saw that the number of campaigns that went out of budget in the middle the day was x2 higher than usual. Many advertisers didn’t allocate sufficient budget to their campaigns, and it ran out during the day.
Let them know about this before the start of the Shopping season and update them throughout, to maximize their revenue! And make sure they have enough supply for the increased demand.
Nobody wants to run out of stock in the middle of the sale, and lose out on all the potential revenue still to come.
Share the top potential categories (highest volume of ad requests, best CTR, best conversion rates, …) with the sellers in those categories, for them to run more campaigns and ads.
Optimize the campaigns more aggressively and daily, as the peak season lasts for a few days only
Check for bad performing products/keywords to be excluded, and for good ones to be boosted
(increase bids for manual campaigns/ increase the targeted ACoS for automatic ones)
Add more slots
As seen previously, some stores gave more space to sponsored ads during Black Friday and the Shopping season. And their results were amazing!
Your sellers will have even more visibility, more impressions, clicks, conversions.
It also allows new sellers (starting to sell during Black Friday) to get a “taste” of the great performance they can generate and help engage them and keep them advertising throughout the year.
The bottom line: more earnings for the sellers, the store, and a better purchase experience for the consumer who sees the top products first! Win-win-win!
To summarize: since consumers are more focused on purchasing during the shopping season, the opportunities for sellers and retailers are endless.
To maximize performance, sellers should pay attention to their stock, as well as budgets according to traffic, run more campaigns in the top potential categories and optimize their campaigns daily and more aggressively than as usual.
To help your sellers maximizing their performance, as a marketplace, you should communicate the best practices with your sellers and provide more advertising space to the sponsored ads by allocating more slots than as usual.
If you haven’t done a shopping season webinar now is a good time and remember – There is always more room for sponsored products, especially in the shopping season.
About Mabaya
Mabaya, a Criteo company, offers a white-label self-service retail media platform for online retailers and marketplaces that enables sellers and brands to bid in order to ensure their products are listed in premium locations in the online store.
The platform is integrated in more than 50 ecommerce sites around the globe (such as Bol.com, Jumia, Manomano, Kaufland, Hepsiburada, Falabella etc.), serving more than 70,000 advertisers and sellers.
