The Gift you Didn't Get

Through focus groups and research, we unearthed the following insight: “The Holiday Shopper’s Dilemma”. Each year, as the holiday season approaches, consumers are stuck between two decisions once they have identified a product they really wanted for themselves: to buy it on sale during Black Friday or wait until Christmas in hopes that their loved ones get it for them as a gift.

On one hand, shoppers can buy the item during Black Friday, but this might ''ruin the moment'' if they end up receiving it as a Christmas gift, not counting the awkwardness of pretending to be surprised. On the other hand, if they decide not to buy, they would run the risk of not getting their desired gift at all for Christmas, on top of missing out on purchasing it with Black Friday discounts.

To achieve the first step of determining intent, we leveraged Google Analytics as our main data source and were able to build a “high intent” profile based on different signals, including: time spent on product page, frequency of daily repeat visit, volume of add to cart without purchase among other data points. This profile was then cross-referenced on all categories and allowed us to pinpoint those where consumers has expressed highest interest. We chose the week of Black Friday and Cyber Monday as our period of reference as this is when consumers are most actively looking for gifts they want.

Next, on the Christmas day (December 25th) we analysed which categories had the same high intent profile. This is based off the premise that people who haven’t received the gift they wanted will come back on Sport Chek’s site the day after Christmas to look for product they’d want to buy during Boxing Week. During this analysis, we discovered that 80% of the searched items both on Black Friday and Christmas Day were for the same top twenty products. This meant that we could capture the bulk of the demand simply by supporting these items.

After validation of stock inventory levels for these products, we were ready for the final step of this process; which was deployment. On Boxing Day, armed with a list of gifts that consumers didn’t get, we deployed personalized ads across Facebook and Google to reach users who expressed high intent. We created dozens of audiences pools filled with users who visited these top twenty product pages and scaled it with similar audiences. Customized creatives were created with the right message, product and offer and thus we helped those unfortunate consumers to obtain the gift they didn’t get for Christmas.