Ecommerce is set to steal the lion’s share of growth when it comes to US retail holiday season sales in 2024, growing a whopping 9.5% against a total growth prediction of 4.8%, according to eMarketer. And as Walmart steals a lead — adopting October 8th as its new Black Friday — now’s the time to put your ecommerce portfolio through the digital shelf optimization routine and get it retail-ready. In this guide, designed for brands and advertising agencies, we will cover:
- Your checklist for maximizing online sales, winning new-to-brand customers and gaining competitive advantage during Black Friday and Cyber 5 in 2024.
- How to make sure your products are visible on Amazon and other retailers.
- Easy ways to seasonalize content, manage the Buy Box, and recover revenue after the event.
What is digital shelf optimization?
Digital shelf optimization is the process of improving how your products are displayed and perform across e-commerce platforms and online marketplaces. It involves optimizing various elements such as product content, images, descriptions, pricing, availability, and customer reviews to ensure products rank higher in search results and convert more visitors into buyers.
Why is digital shelf optimization important?
Using Amazon as an example, its algorithm favors products, or ASINs, that sell the most in their category at a good price, display great content, and are highly valued by shoppers. (Amazon measures shopper value on several factors such as the number of returns, reviews, and star ratings.) Brands that optimize their products in line with Amazon’s algorithm will rank higher in search and be more visible. As a result, they’ll win more sales.
To get the most out of Black Friday and Cyber 5 this year, your seasonal assortment will need to be in good health. Once you’ve chosen which products you’ll be promoting and made sure they will be in stock, let’s take a look at the jobs you’ll need to do to make sure your holiday deals and digital shelf promotions are in good shape.
Be visible. How to improve your share of search during Black Friday and Cyber 5
It’s crucial that shoppers can find your brand and your product during peak traffic periods like Black Friday, whether they’re looking for your brand or browsing the category. The intensity of competition from other brands and sellers during the event makes it difficult to rank highly in search and expensive to buy visibility through advertising. Amazon and other retailers use a Best Seller Rank score to decide which products top the list in search. Whichever retailer you’re working with, products that achieve Best Seller status in their category will have the most visibility. Your goal should be to achieve the highest rank possible.
Here are some tactics that brands use to secure a top spot in the lead up to Black Friday and Cyber 5:
Review your category choices
If your products are in highly competitive categories, it’s worth checking if there are other categories or sub-categories where competition is not so fierce. Switching your product to a less competitive category will improve your chances of winning in search and achieving that coveted Best Seller badge.
Invest in early holiday promotions and pay to play
Promoting your product early will boost sales (and therefore your search rank) ahead of the main event, giving your product a competitive lead when it comes to organic search. A combination of organic search strategies and sponsored ads will increase your visibility overall.
Building Share of Voice (SOV) in retail media
In retail media terms, SOV is the percentage of the available real estate your brand occupies on a retailer platform compared to your competitors. Pacvue makes it easy to develop your Share of Voice strategy and measure the success of your efforts against competitors. You can also track the types of campaigns your competitors are running and monitor their keywords. Find out more about SOV including specific strategies for winning SOV on Amazon, Walmart and Instacart in our detailed guide.
Spice up your digital shelf content and product detail pages
Your product detail pages, or PDPs, need to be optimized with holiday shoppers in mind. You should aim to optimize both words and images. Good copy with relevant keywords will make your product findable; great images and rich content will convince shoppers to buy it.
Five ways to optimize your listings on Amazon for Black Friday 2024 and Cyber 5
First, get listed!
The first step is to check Amazon is listing all the products you want to include in your seasonal assortment. If not, you will need to fix “no listing” errors to ensure all your products are available.
Invest in rich content
Amazon claims “Basic A+ Content can increase sales by up to 8%—and well-implemented Premium A+ Content can increase sales by up to 20%”, so you will need to ramp up your product images to increase conversions. Pacvue Commerce can audit your content and show you the listings that could be improved. It can also compare your competitors’ content and give you pointers to gain advantage.
Seasonalize your PDPs and your ad creative<
Ads with a seasonal theme convert better than evergreen ads. As we discovered with Duracell, even adding a Christmas tree in an ad for a battery drives higher conversion during a seasonal event. The same is true for images you use on the product pages of your seasonal assortment and deals. Pacvue’s Copilot not only helps you optimize your ad campaigns, but it also creates highly personalized, seasonal content. You can find out how it works here.
Strategic keyword targeting for seasonal searches
Update your product detail pages with seasonal keywords to tune into holiday shopper search trends. Pacvue’s keyword tool will give you popular keywords as well as more nuanced, longtail or seasonal keywords that will improve your product’s relevancy.
Consumers often search for deals and discounts during this period, so include terms like “Black Friday deals,” “holiday offers,” and “best gift.” Tools like Helium 10 integrated with Pacvue will show you seasonal keywords that are relevant to your product and category.
Optimize Ratings and Reviews before Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2024
Ratings and Reviews offer a number of advantages for brands who can harness this user-generated content. Analysing this data with tools like Pacvue Commerce will give you insights into:
- Shoppers’ sentiment about your product, brand and service.
- The common, emerging themes that shoppers talk about in relation to your product and brand.
- New, frequently mentioned keywords that you may have overlooked in your product title and description or in your paid search campaigns.
- Recurring manufacturing or service problems that need to be addressed.
Remember that Ratings and Reviews are highly influential when it comes to tuning the algorithms of most online retailers so it’s wise to try to increase the volume of reviews and your average star rating ahead of tentpole events.
Managing the Amazon Buy Box
For your best chance at securing the Buy Box on Amazon, you’ll need to offer a competitive price and keep stock levels healthy. (Amazon encourages you to automate your pricing to be competitive, and you can find out more about this here.)
Pacvue Commerce offers a range of monitoring capabilities that give you insights to help protect your share of the Buy Box including:
- Monitoring 3P sellers, the price history, and the rate of Buy Box ownership (by product, brand and seller).
- Monitoring lost sales so that you can see the impact of losing the Buy Box on overall revenue.
- Automating tickets to retailers to replenish stock and get items re-listed.
Is your advertising supporting your digital shelf strategy?
Tentpole events like Black Friday are ideal opportunities to:
- Find new-to-brand customers
- Treat existing customers to good deals and allow them to stock up on their favorite products
- Re-engage shoppers who’ve shown interest in your product but didn’t buy
Pacvue’s integrated digital shelf and advertising platform allows you to easily align your digital shelf execution with your advertising strategy. With Pacvue’s advertising tools you can:
- Tap into custom audiences using advanced data tools like Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) or Target Roundel to identify and target shoppers using lifestyle and demographic signals.
- Use Amazon DSP or Search ads to retarget previous customers or those who abandoned their shopping cart (and your product). Black Friday retargeting campaigns can bring back shoppers with enhanced offers and special deals.
- With Pacvue’s measurement tools you can get a single source of truth when it comes to ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, SOV and many other KPIs.
- Pacvue’s automations allow you to launch and manage multiple campaigns with multiple retailers, at speed and at scale, using simple, rules-based and automated bidding.
How important is incrementality in holiday season campaigns?
Incremental sales are the additional purchases directly attributed to a retail media campaign. Without incrementality measurement, it’s hard to know whether an ad is simply shifting existing demand (i.e., customers who would have bought anyway) or actually driving new purchases.
The lion’s share of your advertising budget for tentpole events like Black Friday should be focussed on generating incremental revenue; shoppers who would not otherwise have chosen to buy your brand. Check out Pacvue’s new iROAS measurement platform that combines multiple data sources to take the guesswork out of budgeting and enables you to shift advertising resources swiftly towards incremental sales.
How to recover revenue from Amazon the easy way
When the main event is over, it’s time to calculate your success. However, the tedious process of ironing out discrepancies with retailers like Amazon can cloud your reporting and consume valuable time. Whether you’ve…
- Been overcharged for fees relating to shipping, fulfilment and storage
- Noticed errors in the handling of returned goods
- Experienced lost or damaged inventory
…Pacvue’s Revenue Recovery Service automates the process of identifying, tracking, and recovering expensive accounting and logistical mistakes. Recovering fees and penalties caused by errors in the system can significantly add to profits, for example, seasonal bestseller Duracell recovered $1m in revenue from Amazon in six months using Pacvue’s Revenue Recovery service.
Ready to get started with your digital shelf optimization for Black Friday and Cyber 5?
To maximize your success during Black Friday and Cyber 5 in 2024, optimizing your digital shelf is crucial. By focusing on visibility, category strategy, content enhancement, and leveraging advertising tools, you can stay ahead of the competition and capture new customers. With Pacvue’s integrated solutions, you can ensure your products are prepared for the holiday season and beyond, setting your brand up for sustained growth. Now is the time to implement these optimizations and capitalize on the Golden Quarter’s ecommerce opportunities.
Get in touch if you’d like some help with your digital shelf optimization, your holiday advertising campaigns or revenue recovery challenges.
