3 surprising festive shopping insights you won’t want to miss

The festive season always comes up quicker than the last, but no matter where you are in holiday campaign planning journey, one thing is for certain – understanding your customers, their expectations and how they act online, is crucial to landing your message, driving engagement, and meeting your digital advertising goals.

So, with your goals in mind, we’re excited to share 3 surprising and actionable insights for advertisers we’ve identified from the Holiday Season Marketing Playbook 2024, related to how shoppers behave online during the festive season. Plus (and most importantly), what you can do about it to grow your business during this critical time of year.

With no time to waste, here are the insights.

1. More ad formats lead to more revenue per customer

As customer journeys continue to evolve, we set out to understand what impact that omnichannel marketing has on the bottom line. What we found is that last Holiday season, customers who were exposed to more unique ad formats spent more than customers exposed to fewer ad formats. In fact, when customers who were exposed to Audience Ads, Multimedia Ads, Dynamic Search Ads, Product Ads, and Search Ads spent 23% more than those exposed to Search Ads alone.¹

Here’s what you can do: 

Make sure your digital advertising covers all areas of the marketing funnel this festive season. The easiest way to launch your omnichannel marketing strategy with Microsoft Advertising is to import your campaigns from Google.

Your omnichannel strategy wouldn’t be complete without Performance Max, which is an AI-powered campaign consisting of search, native, and product ads, focused on maximizing conversions across Microsoft properties from a single campaign. Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is on hand to help you build compelling campaigns with generative AI.

Lastly, be sure to consider your budgets, bids and ad scheduling at this competitive time of the year. With more ad exposures in mind, you’ll want to be sure none of your high performing ads run out of budget. Make sure to increase budgets for important days and use Shared budgets to ensure your high-performing campaigns don’t run out of funding.

2. Display, Native, and Video ads shorten customer journeys

The holiday shopping conversion window is long, taking 47 days on average.² One approach we’ve observed that’s influenced customers to convert sooner is diversifying advertising across formats and channels. Specifically, pairing display, native, and video ads with search ads shortened this conversion window by 10 days YoY. This is because Audience Ads maximize your reach and generate new demand with rich storytelling canvases across our network, that then turn into search intent and conversion behaviors.

Here’s what you can do: 

Like our first recommendation, make sure you expand your digital advertising across ad formats and placements to meet your customers wherever they are. Be sure to enable your Search Ads to serve in native placements onto the Microsoft Advertising Network as well as Microsoft Copilot by simply adding image extensions. This will allow you to choose which images are supporting your ads in the search engine results page and elsewhere.

Additionally, be sure to launch Audience Ads at least a month earlier to expand the top of the funnel and influence customer journeys with display, native, or video ads.

3. Search queries are getting longer year-over-year

Another interesting observation we’ve made is the lengthening of search queries. Since 2023, we’ve seen general search queries grow longer by 11% year-over-year. Part of this phenomenon can certainly be attributed to the introduction of generative AI search tools like Microsoft Copilot, which has influenced searchers to input longer and more detailed queries as they use more natural language. Certain markets like the United States seeing even higher growth in length at 14% and industries such as Finance and Food and Grocery up 13%.³

Here’s what you can do: 

To capture longer query searches, be sure to leverage Broad Match and Phrase Match keyword types in your targeting, especially for search and product ads. While Exact Match has the highest CTR, Broad Match and Phrase Match help to drive more volume. Broad Match can also be used to mine new queries you can later add to your exact match portfolio. So, make sure you have full coverage on your keyword match types to not miss out on high intent traffic. Review your keyword match type options.

Another effective way to make sure you’re benefiting from longer search queries is to activate Dynamic Search Ads if you aren’t already. Dynamic Search Ads automatically target relevant search queries based on the content of your website and are created dynamically depending on the search query they’re responding to. Learn more about Dynamic Search Ads.

Lastly, to get in front of searchers using Microsoft Copilot, you can leverage Responsive Search Ads, Multimedia Ads, Performance Max, or Shopping Campaigns to get your search and product ads to serve against relevant chat queries. Make sure you have image extensions added to your Responsive Search Ads.

Looking for even more insights to help button up your festive season digital strategy?

Check out Your Holiday Season Marketing Playbook 2024, or visit our holiday season resources page for additional insights on how to make this festive season your most successful yet!

Pro tip: Connect with your account manager, or one of our advertising experts for a no-cost, 1:1 consultation. We highly recommend you take advantage of this free benefit to discuss how to optimize your account for the upcoming season. Or, if you haven’t gotten started advertising across Microsoft’s 1 billion user network,⁴ sign up for free.

There you have it; three surprising insights (plus more in our guide) about shoppers this festive season, and what you can do about it to drive growth for your business.

Happy advertising!