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3 Strategies For Building Lookalike Audiences From Holiday Traffic

Following the trends of the last few years, it’s expected that this holiday shopping season will last longer and be driven by e-commerce. Insider Intelligence is projecting that holiday retail sales in 2023 will grow by 4.5%, which means the festive season will bring lots of opportunity. 

The best part? This opportunity extends beyond the actual holiday season. The effort that goes into capturing your ideal audience during the holiday season can drive campaign success post holidays as well. 

With lookalike audiences, you’re able to make the most out of your holiday marketing efforts by creating a list of users who mimic the online behaviours of those who visited your site previously. 

What Are Lookalike Audiences

In programmatic advertising, lookalike audiences are a target audience that has similar characteristics to your existing customers or community. A lookalike audience is built by using a sophisticated algorithm that identifies users who share similar interests and behaviours with your existing customers or prospects.

3 Strategies For Building Lookalike Audiences After the Holidays

What are the best ways to use lookalikes during your holiday campaigns? Let’s dig in.

1. Leverage Events Like Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Tentpole events during the holiday season drive more traffic to your channels. If you’re a retail brand, you’ll see more users landing on your website as they shop for gifts. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are shopping events with growing relevance. Both events originated in the US, but the shopping event is becoming increasingly popular around the world. In 2022, shoppers spent a record amount both in brick and mortar stores and online. 

Black Friday and Cyber Monday see such drastic spikes in web traffic, that major retailers consistently report site outages and slowdowns on these days. While sales are the ultimate goal, there’s an opportunity to leverage this traffic for your post-holiday strategy. 

With a lookalike pixel, you can capture all of those users who are researching deals and those day-of site visitors, and create an audience that looks just like them. The benefit is, if the new audience has similar behaviour, it increases the likelihood of conversions down the road.

2. Leverage Lower-Funnel Campaigns for Conversions

The goal of a holistic full-funnel strategy is to guide your audience to the lower-funnel, and earn conversions. By this point in the funnel, you’ve nurtured your target audience, and given them all the information about your product or offering they need to make a decision. Your goal now is to encourage them to convert. 

Whether the conversion is signing up for a webinar, registering for a demo, or purchasing a product, you’ve worked hard to get to this point. Don’t waste the opportunity to find more users who exhibit the same traits as those who are in the bottom of your funnel. 

During the holidays, place a lookalike pixel on your conversion event, like the thank you page after registration or the order confirmed page. You can build a lookalike audience that exhibits similar online behaviours as those who have converted. 

This lookalike audience strategy widens your audience pool and fills your bottom-funnel. You then have an audience to target once the surge in holiday traffic drops off. 

3. Build Lookalike Audiences From Video Completions

Lookalike audiences can also be leveraged for brand awareness campaigns. By building a lookalike audience off of holiday season traffic, you can target users who don’t yet know your brand.

One way to grow brand awareness with lookalike audiences is by leveraging video completions. Install a lookalike pixel on the completion event of a holiday campaign video. The users who have watched your full video will be captured. You can then use that audience to create a lookalike audience that targets similar users, who haven’t yet seen the video. 

Get Started With Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences are an excellent way to reach people who are similar to your existing customers. If they love the product or service you sell, chances are people similar to them will, too! 

During the holiday season, lookalike audiences can serve you well in various scenarios where you want to capture interested and engaged audiences. While you’re in the midst of planning and launching your campaigns for this holiday season, be sure to install a lookalike pixel. This way, you can leverage all of the increased traffic coming your way for your future strategy. 

Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.

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