When you’ve been in ecommerce as long as us, you have your fair share of war stories that have happened during the most important time of the year. Some of these stories stem from things that were outside of our control (we all remember the shipping container that held all the gifts for our GWP offer catching fire in the Pacific Ocean). Other stories, like payment methods failing or pixels being deleted, are preventable with a little bit of foresight.  

Holiday preparedness begins before Q4 and continues throughout the peak season. And because we’re in the business of helping other ecommerce businesses, we want to let you in on everything we do to ensure our Meta performance is strong throughout the holidays. 

Check Early and Check Often 

Here's a housekeeping checklist that our team goes through as early as September and continues to reference throughout October, November and December: 

• Do we have the most up to date promo calendar from our client? 
• Are our Pixel Events tracking properly? 

• • Are your CAPI server-side events tracking properly? 

• Is our product feed up to date? 

• • Match rate should be 90% plus 

• Have we updated our billing process? 

• • If on invoicing, is there enough credit to handle increased spends? 
  • If on credit card, is there enough credit to handle increased spends? 

• • • Is there a backup card on file in case the initial payment method is flagged for any reason? 

• Are our customer lists up to date for lookalike audiences, exclusions, VIP offers, etc.? 

Learn From the Ghosts of Holidays Past 

“You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have – the facts of life.” Gloria Loring isn’t wrong—and her lyrics especially apply to Q4. As you’re crafting the strategy for this year’s holiday season, it’s imperative to take a deep and clinical look at past years’ performance to distinguish what worked and what didn’t and how to apply these learnings to the upcoming promo period. 

From a creative perspective, we use Motion App to look at past promo performance and leverage our robust naming conventions to help answer questions like: static vs video, UGC vs product vs lifestyle, light vs dark, price vs benefits, best performing DTC storytelling pillar, etc. 

From a media perspective, it’s always important to remember why this is called “Black” Friday – this is the time for brands to become profitable for the year and drive as much immediate revenue as possible. In order to do this, it's imperative for everyone working on the business to know what the path to profitability is and what the minimum and maximum thresholds are for your channel as it relates to the overall business. 

Be Flexible and Don’t Be Afraid to Step on the Gas  

Now that you’ve gone through the preparedness checklist, dug through past creative performance, and deeply understand your KPIs and how they impact the overall business, you should be armed with the confidence to take on this upcoming Q4! Now all that’s left to do is launch the campaigns and watch the money roll in, right?  

Wrong! Having a solid plan and strategy is great but once the holiday season is underway, it’s equally important to maintain flexibility and react to what the data is showing. If you’re seeing your campaigns are off to a great start, shift some dollars and scale them as aggressively as you can. If you’re seeing some creatives are duds, cut your losses and pivot away from those. This is where knowing your minimum and maximum KPIs comes in clutch as they give you absolute guardrails to optimize within and help you push your campaigns to the limits during this crucial time period.  

If you want help maximizing your Meta performance, talk with a media expert at Cart.com today. We have a whole team ready to help you grow your ecommerce brand.