TL;DR: Programmatic advertising is one of the most effective ways for ecommerce brands to reach net new customers ahead of the holidays. Brands that plan and launch programmatic well in advance of their peak promotional period can build the awareness and drive traffic that makes their lower-funnel holiday campaigns significantly more productive.
What is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and placement of digital ads across a wide network of websites, apps, streaming platforms, and connected TV. Instead of negotiating placements with individual publishers, advertisers use technology platforms like The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, and Yahoo DSP to bid on impressions in real time.
Programmatic advertising allows brands to target audiences based on data such as demographics, interests, and behavior rather than prior interaction with the brand. That makes the channel especially effective at introducing brands to shoppers who have never encountered them before.
Jargon Alert: There are many terms and acronyms in the world of programmatic advertising. If you’re new to it, check out the glossary at the end of this article.
The Opportunity: Reaching Customers Who Don’t Know You Yet
Most holiday advertising competes for the same shoppers: people who have already searched for a product, visited a site, or engaged with a brand. Programmatic advertising expands that pool. Its core strength is identifying net new users who have never interacted with your brand, and then tailoring placements to serve the right users at the right time – without overserving them.
Programmatic formats such as CTV (connected TV), OLV (online video), native, and display operate at the top of the purchase funnel. They build brand awareness, affinity, and trust during a shopper’s first exposure to your product. When that shopper moves further down funnel and begins to research a purchase, paid search, paid social, and other lower-funnel campaigns are positioned to convert them.
The incremental reach that programmatic delivers can supercharge your brand’s holiday season by delivering a larger, better-primed audience to every other channel in your media mix.
Why Advance Planning Matters
Data tracking from The Trade Desk’s Conversion Details Report reveals that the path from an initial programmatic impression to a final purchase frequently spans several weeks. At ROI Revolution we generally use a 40- to 60-day attribution window for programmatic advertising. That timeline means that with data-driven ad buying, early planning is necessary for maximum impact on holiday season revenue.
We recommend launching programmatic roughly two months ahead of your lower-funnel holiday push. The channels run alongside each other, but that lead time allows new customers to become familiar with your brand before promotions begin. When holiday offers go live, those shoppers are already considering your product and are more ready to act, which strengthens lower-funnel performance.
Starting Late? It’s Not Too Late
Brands that haven’t launched programmatic by October still have a meaningful opportunity. Because programmatic focuses on reaching new audiences, awareness built at any point in the year retains its value.
Not every new customer will purchase before the holidays. Some will convert in the first quarter of the new year, during a later promotional event, or at full price. Additionally, the 40-to-60-day window is an average, not a rule. Some shoppers who encounter a CTV or OLV ad are already in the market for that product and purchase quickly.
Tactics That Accelerate Conversions
For brands with goals beyond awareness, several programmatic placements perform more like traditional performance channels and generate conversions within a shorter time frame. There are some things worth knowing about leveraging programming media buying as a middle or lower funnel consideration strategy.
- Online video and native drive strong real-time engagement. Both formats generate high click-through rates, and native ads can make the entire unit (headline, caption, and call to action) clickable.
- Landing page quality directly affects results. Just as with search and social advertising, a clear call to action paired with a strong landing page shortens the path to purchase, while still reaching new audiences.
- Retargeting extends the conversation. Programmatic campaigns can retarget users who have viewed CTV ads, watched or completed online videos, engaged with native creative, or visited your site.
Programmatic is not primarily a conversion channel. However, when shoppers engage with upper-funnel ads, programmatic retargeting creates a direct opportunity to convert them.
Put Your First-Party Data to Work
First-party data, including site visitor data and email lists, can serve as seed data for lookalike audiences and third-party audience targeting in programmatic campaigns.
The more first-party data a brand provides, the stronger those lookalike audiences become. Robust purchaser data enables the platforms to find new prospects who share the behaviors, interests, and environments of your existing customers.
Building Creative That Tells a Story
One of the most common mistakes brands make is running the same creative in the programmatic channel that they use for search, social, or retail media.
Lower-funnel creative is designed to showcase the product and drive a purchase. Programmatic creative serves a different purpose: establishing a connection with new customers and communicating why the product belongs in their lives. The most effective approaches include:
- Storytelling and lifestyle content that shows how people use the product in everyday situations
- Athlete, celebrity, and influencer partnerships, which are especially prevalent on CTV across streaming, sports, and entertainment networks
- Relatable scenarios that help viewers picture themselves using the product
Creative like this creates a lasting association between the brand and a story, which product-only creative rarely achieves.
Timing Holiday Creative and Promotions
Introduce promotions early. Even two to three months before your holiday sale begins, it’s valuable to reference upcoming holiday promotions, brand partnerships, or where products will be available. Informed shoppers are less likely to miss an offer they would have acted on.
Transition to seasonal creative 30 to 40 days out. Seasonal elements such as snow or holiday imagery can make creative more timely, and creative teams or AI tools can usually produce these updates efficiently. If you plan to use Christmas-themed creative, make that shift around Thanksgiving, since that’s when most consumers shift into a holiday mindset.
Pacing Your Holiday Budget
Brands can expect a modest increase in CPMs (cost of 1,000 impressions) during the holiday season, but with active management costs can remain close to non-holiday levels.
Budget timing has a greater impact on results than cost. We recommend the following approach:
- Invest early. Increase upper-funnel programmatic spend during the period from six weeks to two weeks before your key holiday event.
- Return to baseline in the final two weeks. Bring upper-funnel spend back to standard, year-round levels as the promotional event approaches.
- Keep lower-funnel programmatic elevated. Maintain retargeting spend through the promotional season to your last-ship date, to drive engaged shoppers toward purchase.
Taking a Multi-Channel Approach for Faster Conversions
We’ve established that programmatic advertising’s greatest advantage is reaching net new customers before their shopping journey even begins. However, this means that these campaigns do not always lead to an immediate interaction with the brand, and programmatic spend isn’t easy to tie directly to conversions. Because of this, brands new to programmatic ad buying should consider it as part of the full media mix rather than as a standalone, ROAS-focused channel. Its value lies in how it strengthens performance across every other channel.
That’s why a comprehensive multi-channel strategy is essential. A shopper who encounters a brand across CTV, OLV, native, Meta, and Google will accumulate multiple engagements with your brand. According to CapitalOne Shopping, consumers interact with a brand an average of eleven times, across multiple channels, before buying, and omnichannel shoppers deliver a 30% higher lifetime value than single-channel shoppers. When added to robust strategies on organic and other paid channels, programmatic advertising can supercharge your high seasonality and drive accelerated growth long past the holiday shopping season.
Get Your Programmatic Strategy Holiday-Ready
ROI Revolution’s programmatic team builds full-funnel strategies that bring net new customers to your brand and work in coordination with your search, social, and retail media campaigns. Whether you’re planning ahead or looking to make the most of the current season, contact us to develop a programmatic plan aligned with your holiday goals.
Glossary
- CPM (cost per mille): The cost of 1,000 ad impressions
- CTV (connected TV): Ads delivered through internet-connected televisions and streaming devices, such as smart TVs and streaming apps
- Display advertising: Image-based banner ads shown on websites and apps
- First-party data: Information a brand collects directly from its customers and audiences, such as site activity, purchase history, and contact information like email and SMS
- Lookalike audience: A targeting group made up of new prospects who share characteristics with a brand’s existing customers
- Lower funnel: The stage of the customer journey where shoppers are close to purchasing, typically reached through search, shopping, and retargeting campaigns
- Native advertising: Ads designed to match the look and format of the content surrounding them on a website or app
- OLV (online video): Video ads that run across websites, apps, and video platforms outside of traditional linear TV
- Retargeting: Serving ads to people who have previously interacted with a brand’s ads or website
- ROAS (return on ad spend): The revenue a campaign or channel earns compared to what it costs, often expressed as a ratio
- Touch point: Any interaction a consumer has with a brand, such as seeing an ad, visiting a site, or receiving an email
- Upper funnel: The awareness stage of the customer journey, where shoppers first discover a brand or product
Sources
- CapitalOne Shopping: Omnichannel Statistics
- The Trade Desk: The Trader’s Guide to Measurement
