3 Strategies For Building Lookalike Audiences From Holiday Traffic

Based on trends from previous years, this holiday shopping season is expected to last just as long—if not longer—than last year’s and continue to be driven by e-commerce. EMARKETER predicts that holiday retail sales in 2024 will grow by 4.8%, which means the festive season will bring lots of opportunities for advertisers. 

The best part? The effort that goes into capturing your ideal audience’s attention during the holiday season can also drive campaign success throughout the year.

With lookalike audiences, you can maximize your holiday marketing efforts by creating a list of users who mimic the online behaviours of your ideal customers, expanding your reach and increasing the likelihood of a conversion. 

What Are Lookalike Audiences

In programmatic advertising, lookalike audiences are target audiences with characteristics similar to those of your existing customers or community. A lookalike audience is built using a sophisticated algorithm that identifies users who share interests and behaviours similar to your existing customers or prospects. This enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of advertising campaigns by allowing advertisers to expand their reach beyond their customer base and target additional audiences with a high probability of conversion.

3 Strategies For Building Lookalike Audiences During 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 during, and in the lead up to, the holidays as they shop for gifts.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have grown in popularity over the years, with retailers dropping deals as early as two months in advance. In 2023, shoppers spent a record $964.4 billion USD 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 also an opportunity to leverage this traffic for your post-holiday marketing strategy and beyond.

With a lookalike pixel, you can capture all of those users who are searching for deals and create an audience with similar interests, increasing the likelihood of conversions even after the holidays.

2. Leverage Lower-Funnel Campaigns for Post-Holiday Conversions

The goal of a full-funnel strategy is to guide your audience to the lower-funnel. By that point, you’ve nurtured your target audience, and given them all the information 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 at the bottom of your funnel. 

During the holidays, place a lookalike pixel on your conversion event, like a thank you, registration, or order confirmation page. You can use this to build a lookalike audience that shares similar online behaviours to those who have converted. 

This lookalike audience strategy widens your audience pool and fills your bottom-funnel, giving you 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 based on holiday season traffic, you can target users who aren’t aware of your brand.

One way to boost 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 watch your entire video will be captured. You can then use that audience data to create a lookalike audience targeting similar users. 

Get Started With Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences help you find new customers who share similarities with your current ones. If your existing customers love your product or service, chances are these users will too. 

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

FAQs About Lookalike Audience