7 Tips To Boost Holiday Sales This Season

Anne-Lise Sharbatian
5 min readOct 26, 2021

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The holiday season is upon us and players around the world are looking forward to a time of traditions, celebrations, building wishlists, and of course — the festive shopping season.

There are 2.7B gamers around the world, dozens of millions of which comprise Tempo’s audience. 84% of our audience playing games on their phone will plan their holiday gifting on mobile.

Year over year, businesses and brands look at the holiday season as a huge opportunity to capitalize on the massive spending period and make lasting impressions with current and new customers.

In this blog, we’ll cover 7 ways to increase e-Commerce sales on mobile during the holiday shopping season — and why e-Commerce businesses of all sizes should be incorporating mobile gaming into their holiday marketing strategies.

1. Leverage the Buying Power of Millennials & Gen Z

Millennials represent the largest generation in US history, and are known for their impulsive spending habits, especially when compared to generations that have preceded them. Gen Z also plays a significant role during the holiday season with a huge impact on household spend.

Together, millennials and Gen Z have over $4 trillion in direct global spending power. This presents a compelling business opportunity for all businesses, particularly when considering where to spend ad dollars this holiday season. Additionally, they spend 1.6x more than the average shopper across all Q4 shopping moments.

There’s no better place to engage with millennials and Gen Z than within the comforting, adrenaline inducing mobile gaming environments. Not only are players more active during the holidays having fun and even playing with friends, they’re also ready to spend — we saw an +119% increase in total in-app purchases in November and December of 2020 compared to the year prior. Leveraging this highly engaged audience will be the key to driving the most e-Commerce sales this holiday season.

2. Start Advertising Early, Build Momentum, & Convert

Mobile gamers experience many shopping moments during the holidays. Here’s an overview on how to develop a holiday strategy to reach them throughout the season:

  • November: Build Momentum and Optimize: Mobile players purchases peak about a month before Christmas and 72% of millennials and Gen Z plan to shop Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That’s a huge opportunity to showcase your best deals.
  • December — January: Convert Engaged Shoppers: Focus on performance to close out the shopping season. Feature last-minute sales and drive urgency by listing your shipping cut-off dates. Use clear and bold calls to action to help players convert.

3. Showcase Your Products & Holiday Sales

Using full screen images/video and audio in your ads can inspire, educate and move shoppers to buy. Place your products front and center in your creative to drive desire, and consider using a simple template to quickly repurpose for your Holiday Tempo Ads.

Use strong, clear and compelling language within your Tempo ads to drive urgency with players. Strong offer messaging (from the beginning of the ad) focused on your doorbuster deals is key to driving sales. Additionally, leverage the phrases, traditions, emotions, days and moments that matter in your ads to help drive purchase intent.

Learn more about how to boost ad engagement by checking out this blog, Tempo Ads Best Practices: 10 Tips to Help Increase Ad Engagement.

4. Use Ad Formats Geared Towards Your Goals

Tempo Ads are for every business, big or small. Use Tempo’s full-screen, immersive ads to engage your audience in an impactful way — we’ve seen that full-screen vertical ads on mobile games drove more than 2x the lift in awareness than other platforms tested. Engage with mobile gamers in a way that’s playful, non-intrusive, and feels organic to the medium.

When running e-Commerce Holiday campaigns on Tempo, consider using some of the below Ad Formats that give a look into the products you’re selling and create a cohesive shopping experience:

  • Collection Ads: A Collection Ad features four tappable tiles to showcase multiple products, giving players a frictionless way to browse and buy. By showcasing multiple products, you’re asking customers which product(s) they’d love to purchase, not whether or not they would like to make a purchase in the first place.
  • Rewarded Ads: These ads are a staple in modern mobile advertising. They enable players to earn in-app rewards for viewing your products. Rewarded ads offer the same features as Collection Ads.
  • Tempo Minis: Minis are half screen in-play ads which slide from the bottom and let you advertise products related to game play. So, if a player is applying make up on their avatar, we can show your products at the same time.

5. Track Actions On Your Ads & Behaviors With our Tracking Tools

Tracking actions taken on your ad is important for many reasons — you can understand where shoppers are clicking, where they’re dropping off, and build retargeting campaigns to reconnect with them and convert. When running Tempo e-Commerce campaigns to drive online sales, it’s imperative to understand which context, copy, colors, and products work best to build an audience of mobile players and to re-engage and convert into purchasers and repeat customers.

6. Measure Results to Understand What’s Resonating With Your Audience

Planning and launching holiday advertising campaigns on any platform is the foundation of any strong holiday marketing strategy — what comes after is crucial to understanding how your investment is producing results for your business, and how you can adjust and scale up to maximize your return on investment.

At Tempo, we’ll help you optimize your ads by

  • Building reports for you to see insights into your campaign’s performance on a regular basis.
  • Help you easily set up and act on campaign experiments to help you form hypotheses, identify what’s working, and take action to inform your campaign strategy.
  • Tap into Contextual Targeting to learn about your targeted audience, create hyper-relevant ad creative, and build out audience segments specific to your products.

Learn more about contextual targeting to launch Tempo Ads by checking out this blog, The Brilliant Power of Contextual Targeting and How to Use It.

7. Retarget Engaged & Previous Customers to Drive More Sales

Retargeting is one of the greatest ways to optimize your holiday advertising campaigns — retargeting helps move potential customers from awareness, to consideration, and finally into the purchase phase of the buying journey.

  • Retarget previous or interested customers: Thanks to our analytics, you can retarget players who have engaged with your Ads in the past and/or contexts that have worked best for you. Retarget players who have swiped up on a Tempo Mini, viewed a full Video through Collections/Rewarded Ads, scrolled through your products many times, and shared / saved your products with their friends.

In Summary:

Tempo offers brands an opportunity to advertise products and holiday promotions to a unique audience with full-screen, one-click transaction ads. Increase e-Commerce sales this holiday season by launching ads on mobile games.

The simplest way to create your first advertising e-Commerce holiday campaign is simply by reaching out to us or meeting us on our website, and we’ll help you get in the game in a heart beat.

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Anne-Lise Sharbatian

Anne-Lise is the founder of Tempo, an in-game ad network that connects brands and developers across the globe.