How the calendar year is going to impact the ecommerce peak period in 2024

Listening to Christmas music yet? It’s early I know, 90 days to be exact, but for marketers, it’s become a recurring narrative that planning for peak is necessary earlier and earlier each year. Whilst the peak period typically stretches from October to January, at Google Retail Live this year, we learnt that 33% of shoppers will have ‘completed’ their holiday shopping before the end of October.

Supporting the narrative of peak creeping forward year after year, Google held their flagship retail ready event 2 weeks earlier than last year. It’s a clear reflection that we’re getting better at understanding how complex online user behaviour is, as well as how long a user’s purchase journey can be.

So how is the peak season going to look this year?

For a start, our clients operating in the US need to be aware that the 2024 holiday season (post-cyber monday) will have 5 fewer days than last year, so each day will need to work harder. Therefore, expect more competition, higher CPMs and therefore the need to capture engagement quickly.

We’ll also have 1 less weekend day in the holiday season this year, with 20 working days in December this year (+1 versus 2023). If your brand typically sees a boost on the weekend, which is very typical for our ecommerce clients, then you’ve got one less day to make that happen. Christmas will land on a Wednesday though, so if you can offer delivery on products within a 3-day window, you’ll be able to offer some last minute shopping options – which also make great urgency ad creative.

Cyber Monday also sits later in the year in 2024, landing on December 2nd compared to November 27th last year. The Peak Period of 2024 will likely feel more like it stretches over the entirety of Q4 rather than being split between Black Friday / Cyber Monday and the holiday season. This could well stretch your budgets and make deciding when to push difficult.

Meanwhile, the nature of the Black Friday period will continue to change. ‘Fake Friday’, the Friday before what we used to understand as the actual Friday of Black Friday, has been on the rise in recent years. It’s therefore highly likely your competitors will not focus their discounts on Black Friday itself.

Those discounts themselves are likely to change, as user’s expectations for large savings increase. Brands offered +5% more discounts on their products year over year, and with financial pressures ever present for consumers, it’s likely only the largest discounts are going to capitalise on increased demand.

With so many differences to the calendar versus last year, we’ll need to adapt our strategies to operate in what will ultimately be a shorter, more competitive peak period this year. If you’ve not started thinking about it yet, here are our recommendations for where to start:

• Consider your budget pacing. Review your historic data to identify when your profit was strongest, and consider focussing your budget here. However, consider your short and long term goals. If you don’t speak to prospective customers ahead of peak, your brand position will be weaker when it matters the most.

• Expect CPC and CPM to increase at this time of year which will likely affect your ROAS. This happens every year, so prepare to face that with confidence, and consider efficiency-based bidding: such as Target ROAS on Google or Cost per Result on Meta.

• Monitor your competitors, which we should all be doing anyway, but at this time of year it’s very easy for a competitor to swoop in with competitive discounts that can really affect your own conversion rate.