Sometimes, it can feel like there’s not much of a break between the crazy end-of-year holiday shopping season and planning for the New Year. Maybe that’s because there isn’t. But January is the perfect time for brands to reflect on what worked last year and how you can optimize retail media strategies for 2025.
We asked the Pacvue team how advertisers can leverage learnings from the holiday shopping rush to form healthy optimization habits that last all year long.
“January is a critical month for eCommerce brands to lay the groundwork for year-long success,” says Alyssa Schafer, Retail Media Search Manager at Pacvue. “By leveraging insights from the Q4 holiday season and aligning with broader company KPIs, brands can cultivate lasting relationships with shoppers and maintain their loyalty throughout the year.”
One thing to focus on: new-to-brand customers. As Max Faucher, Sr. Retail Media Search Manager explains:
“Tentpole events are a great opportunity to bring in new customers. We typically see new-to-brand rates increase by 10% or more. So then the question is how to retain these new customers and build healthy repeat shopping behavior.”
Here’s what Pacvue’s brand advertising experts say are their top recommendations:
1. Analyze Your Holiday Performance
Ring in the New Year – and ring in the Q4 performance reports, too. Make sure to review your holiday performance by sales, traffic, and conversions to see what worked and what didn’t.
A lot of this comes down to format: what channels worked? What ad types and targeting strategies worked? Did you see big differences in product page traffic or high-intent search terms? How about product types?
From ad spend to partner and inventory metrics, tying your tactics back to promotion and campaign efficiency metrics, can help you understand what performed best in 2024 and refine your 2025 strategies.
Romina Dichio, Retail Media Search Manager at Pacvue says, “Now is a great time to align your strategies, and especially deals, across all platforms to ensure a strong customer experience after the holiday shopping rush. Refreshing product detail pages, ensuring A+ content is up to date, and updating hidden keywords to ensure consistency across retailers going into the new year.”
2. Launch Your New Year’s Campaign
Want to reach the holiday shoppers that browsed, but didn’t make a purchase? Or start connecting with audiences on new channels in 2025?
You can capitalize on timely New Year resolutions in your campaign planning. Here’s some ideas:
- Help with New Year’s Goals. Position products as solutions for your audience’s New Year’s resolutions by tying them to common New Year themes such as productivity, health, home improvement, organization, etc.
- Refresh Your Messaging. Work to update your retail media ads, banner images, emails, and social content with a New Year’s theme throughout January.
- Measure & Test. Launch new A/B tests based on what you saw succeed during the holidays to figure out what campaign tactics perform the best for each audience.
3. Make the Most Out of Amazon Marketing Cloud
To really start planning for the New Year, you’ll want to invest some more time in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to unlock new opportunities. As Ari Sperber, Sr. Retail Media Search Manager explains:
“With Amazon’s latest releases at UnBoxed 2024, advertisers now can use Amazon Marketing Cloud across all of their marketing and Pacvue enables brands to create personalized touchpoints at scale. By combining AMC with Pacvue, you can seamlessly create custom audiences, apply them to reach the right customers, and understand which advertisements are driving sales beyond last-touch attribution.”
By integrating your advertising tactics with AMC, you can gain new insights into what’s happening beyond the retail media ecosystem and see the shopper journey in more detail.
4. Experiment with Product Sequencing
With Amazon Marketing Cloud, you can analyze the data on cross-purchasing patterns. That means you can see where (and what) customers are most likely to buy after an initial purchase. This is an important detail: the product that performs the best with new shoppers might not be the product that performs the best with return shoppers. Look for opportunities to drive complementary purchases with another category or brand to increase AOV for returning customers.
Our team recommends an evaluation of these product sequences by using AMC data and then using display and search advertising to see which campaigns get the most engagement. For example:
- With display, test tailored audiences for the new-to-brand customers that purchased during the holiday season, but exclude the in-market customers who have already looked at your pages are most likely to move down the funnel
- Use AMC insights to see best-fit products for audiences and understand purchase frequency for 30 and 60-day windows
- Optimize your budget with impression frequency reports to set a frequency cap to lower your cost-per-action
5. Test Video Campaigns in your Cross Channel Strategy
“Across all retailers, we’re seeing advertisers prioritize brand education through campaign types like sponsored brand and sponsored video,” says Veronica Slater, Retail Media Manager at Pacvue. “Using custom imagery, whether through AI functionality or brand owned creative assets, helps drive increased interactions while also showcasing the breadth of your portfolio, product innovation, and specific benefits.”
- Amazon: Utilize video top of search campaigns directing specifically to the brand’s store, while also securing prime real estate for awareness across top search placements.
- Walmart Connect: Lean into multi-item video campaigns showcasing variety in product type, specific flavors, unique scents, or even a cross-product regimen within your brand.
- Sam’s Club: Test this recently-launched video asset and gain a competitive advantage by being an early adopter of this campaign type.
We all know how fast the New Year can start to take off. By thinking through the best ways to look at your 2024 strategy and using new methods to optimize your 2025 strategy, brands can keep their ad strategy healthy, happy, and profitable throughout the year.
And by reviewing the numbers, launching new campaigns based on audience and product data, and digging into AMC opportunities, you can focus on the shopper journey in a new way, too.
