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 2025 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 2025 Holiday spending trends and insights report, in collaboration with GroundTruth, 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.
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It is time for us to polish off our crystal ball and give our predictions straight from consumers’ fingertips for the hot products of the 2012 holiday season. Gadgets will reign across many ages Tablets including LeapPads, Tabeos, iPads, Kindles and others will continue to be a popular gift this year, with more choices than ever. On the list of top product-related search terms driving traffic to the Retail 500 category of sites, Kindle Fire HD and Windows 8 top the list as new products. Additionally, Meep!, a child friendly tablet appeared in the top fifteen. Accessories for both phones and tablets will also be popular, especially as the variety grows for iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. A reoccurring favorite gift for the holidays is UGGs which shows a decrease year over year. However, another brand with a similar product is Bearpaw, which is in the top ten searches and has seen big growth year over year.Source: Experian Hitwise Dolls, video games and Furbys, oh my! To identify the popular toys for gifts this year, we researched product-related search terms driving traffic to ToysRUs.com compared to last year’s holiday season. We uncovered trends in the doll category, Doc McStuffins as number one on the list, along with the classic Barbie, which saw a growth in searches year over year. The Furby is making a strong comeback at the number two spot with a reboot and new features. Another trend here is tablets, from branded searches like LeapPad and Kurio there is also the generic term ‘tablets for kids’. In the video game category, the new Wii U that is debuting just in time for Black Friday and should be a big gift this year, along with searches for PS3 games and the Nintendo 3ds xl are all in the top 20 searches.Source: Experian Hitwise Keywords of the consumer to identify demand Beyond product names, it is important to understand the actual way people search, using key phrases and questions. Last year, for example, there was a lot of activity around ‘in-stock’ products, such as the LeapPad explorer, which was hugely popular and quickly sold out in many stores. Retailers and marketers should monitor this throughout the season and make sure to optimize for in stock if there is a popular product that they have available.Source: Experian Hitwise Consumers also focus on what is the ‘best’ – so we see search activity around ‘best place to buy’, particularly around electronics. Questions such as ‘where to buy a’ specific product are also common, such as ‘where to buy a kindle’. These phrases offer opportunities to boost search campaigns by considering how consumers phrase their questions to ensure to capture these searches.Source: Experian Hitwise Quick tip: In the retail category there will tend to be a lot of retail branded store terms but to keep up with holiday search behavior and help make analysis quick, create portfolios of branded terms to easily exclude those from a certain category. When you strip out all the variations of that term you are able to gain insight into product searches that are most popular to a certain site or category. For more insight on the hot product trends for this year from our Hitwise trend-spotters, watch our webcast. Contact us today
My Experian Marketing Services’ colleagues and resident data experts Bill Tancer and Marcus Tewskbury answered the above question for marketers during our recent 2012 Holiday Planning Webinar. The webinar recapped key 2011 holiday marketing results, plus featured trends, benchmarks and recommendations for a successful and profitable 2012 holiday shopping season. Here are a few cool facts: For the first time, last year’s Cyber Monday beat Thanksgiving Day as the busiest online shopping day of the year Facebook and Pinterest were the top traffic sources to the Experian Marketing Services Retail 500 Pinterest visitors most often went to etsy.com and amazon.com from the pinterest.com site Dynamic content in emails can drive up to a 70% lift in open rates Tying web, email and in-store promotions together enhances the shopping experience and improves sales The bottom line is that marketers need to understand where there customers are, when they are there, and what they are doing. Armed with that knowledge, you can deliver personalized and targeted holiday messages that are sure to make this shopping season merry and bright (and profitable!). View the webinar to learn more. Contact us today
The NCAA basketball tournament tipped off this week much to the delight of fans across the United States. Supporters who have truly caught March Madness often follow more than one game at a time, especially during the first week of the tournament play. Thanks to simulcast streaming of games online and via mobile apps, die-hards are better equipped to keep track of multiple games at once. Those who stream games online live in every corner of the country, but some locales are more likely to log on for their March Madness fix than others. According to Experian Simmons, you are most likely to be streaming the game online if you live in one of these markets: Contact us today