When you picture this year’s holiday buying season, you probably envision mobs of shoppers edging their way through the aisles. Or maybe you visualize crowds in a freezing parking lot at three AM on Black Friday waiting for a retailer to open its doors.
That’s only half the story. Actually, it’s less than half. A Deloitte survey of 4,000 Americans shows that for the first time ever, consumers plan to do 51 percent of their holiday shopping spending online. So, a more accurate picture of holiday shoppers might be someone sitting at home in their pajamas tapping on their iPad.
For marketers, this means that competition for online shoppers will be more intense than any year. That doesn’t mean you should throw money at this problem though. The way to win the holidays is to execute surgical, data-backed media buys while everyone else is tossing money around like, well, holiday shoppers.
Be a smart holiday advertiser.
With the holidays representing 20-30 percent of annual sales for retailers, according to the NRF (National Retail Federation), it’s a critical time — so critical, that many brands will tolerate wasted advertising spending. Perhaps it’s better to hit too many people than too few people, so what’s a few thousand wasted ad impressions?
While this approach may be accepted as standard practice, it sidesteps the fact that a mechanism to avoid overspending already exists. It’s called incrementality.
Borrowed from science and medicine, the incrementality concept is based on randomized control trials that measure the effects of one variable by observing what happens to a similar group that’s not exposed to the variable. The difference between the exposed group and the control group can tell you a lot about the success of your treatment within the exposed group.
In advertising and marketing, it’s the same idea: If you run a campaign and then pick a randomized control group that’s not exposed to ads — the holdout audience — then you can find out how much incremental revenue resulted from the campaign. For instance, a sporting goods retailer could target 1,000 ideal users with a new holiday campaign and then withhold…
