Q&A with Pangle: eCommerce Demand Brings Extra Holiday Cheer and Revenue
For consumers, the holidays brings festive celebrations, time spent with family and friends, and lots of shopping. But for app publishers, it’s a critical time of the year that requires preparation and strategy. What should publishers do to get ready for eCommerce demand? We’ve gathered some tips and insights on how to bring extra holiday cheer — and revenue — this holiday season.
Digital Turbine talked with Faye Lee, Pangle’s Account Management Director, to learn more about eCommerce demand and how it helps to diversify publishers’ demand, lift Q4 revenues on major shopping dates for consumers, and deliver high-value ads to app developers. Faye shares key steps for publishers to prepare for increased eCommerce advertising spend.
What is eCommerce demand? How this is different from brand and performance demand?
eCommerce demand is specific to advertisers who drive attention to their products with the goal of driving a sale conversion. Some eCommerce advertisers will run ads with a coupon code to incentivize conversions within the ad itself.
Brand demand comes from advertisers who drive awareness of their product, brand, or service to users. Brand campaigns help to formulate consumer perceptions of that product, brand, or service with the end goal to drive user engagement with that advertiser’s website, app, and social channels as users move through the discovery process for product, service, and brand.
Performance demand advertisers measure the success of the campaigns with quantifiable metrics around user behavior, such as clicks, downloads, purchase, app event, etc. Their goals are more directly tied to these KPIs compared to qualitative measurements. Advertisers measure ROI based on these metrics, and can usually attribute campaign success to certain tactics or creatives.
What are the typical patterns for eCommerce demand throughout the year? Seasonality?
Most publishers are already familiar with western seasonal trends like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, back to school, the highly anticipated Black Friday, as well as overall heightened holiday traffic from October to December. Thinking globally at a regional scale, there is so much more to celebrate with increased eCommerce demand outside of English speaking countries’ holidays.
Globalization has merged major eCommerce sale dates so that Black Friday is also the kickoff to major holiday gift spending, falling just after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. In 2021, Pangle’s LATAM’s revenue saw an 8x jump on Black Friday alone.
In APAC and MENA, similar trends are observed. Instead of Black Friday following U.S. Thanksgiving, these regions have two big sale days in Q4! APAC advertisers gain peak traffic on Nov. 11 and Dec. 12. SEA and Middle East/North Africa (MENA) regions went through tremendous growth within the last year as well. Pangle’s revenue in MENA saw a 6x increase on Nov. 11, while SEA saw a 4x increase on Dec. 12. These two big sales days are not to be missed as a publisher to formulate your Q4 ad monetization strategies for APAC and MENA.
Why is it important to include eCommerce demand in an app developer’s ad stack?
Ads diversity matters! In the absence of ads diversity, ad fatigue sets in and theywill lose effectiveness with less relevance and engagement. Ad fatigue translates to poor campaign performance for advertisers — eCPMs will decline,reflecting poor campaign performance. Changing up the ad experience by including different advertisers in your demand stack keeps ads effective, drives great campaign performance for advertisers, and maximizes your revenue potential with high eCPMs.
How is eCommerce performance for in-app mobile compared to brand or performance ads?
eCommerce demand is the most sensitive to Q4 holiday seasonalities – more so than performance demand. The shopping season is when consumers open their wallets to spend on their loved ones. eCommerce advertisers understand this behavior and spend a substantial portion of their annual marketing budget in the shopping season to maximize their share of the consumer’s wallet spend.
As a publisher, customizing your ads monetization strategy to the local market will help you maximize revenue during this lucrative season. LATAM countries have huge appetites for eCommerce demand during Q4. APAC regions like SEA have two Black Fridays (Nov. 11 and Dec. 12) with December being the larger of the two. MENA has two Black Fridays, with Nov. 11 as the more dominant shopping date compared to the late November Black Friday . Know your users and adjust your in-app content and ads monetization strategy accordingly.
Is there a dedicated template for creative for the shopping season?
Having run successful creatives for eCommerce advertisers during mega sale dates in the past, we’ve seen common creative attributes that increase the success of those campaigns.
- Clear and interesting call to action
- Highlighting the mega sale date
- Polished image/video to capture attention up front
Pangle also has templates ready so that eCommerce advertisers can run at scale to deliver on your traffic with formulas that work to convert.
What should publishers do to get ready to welcome eCommerce spend?
Here are key steps that you can follow:
- 1. Identify key dates. Adjust your ads monetization strategy according to the location of your users. LATAM Black Friday is Nov. 25, while APAC regions like SEA will see traffic peak on Dec. 12.
- 2. Grow users in the target region. Acquire more users in that target region to maximize anticipated increase spend from advertisers.
- 3. Launch different ad formats. Maximize your ads revenue by implementing different ad formats – Pangle supports banners, interstitial, rewarded videos, natives, app open ads. We’ve seen publishers experiment with ad formats they historically have refused who have seen success, especially during holiday sales seasons, with more eCommerces spend coming through those formats.
- 4. Optimize for Show Rates. Do you have frequency caps on? You may want to test reduction or removal of such caps during Q4 to maximize holiday ads revenue. DT FairBid also has a Multi-Testing tool that will allow you to experiment with different ad frequency and pacing rules to find the best balance for your app.
About Faye Lee, Account Management Director at Pangle
Faye loves helping publishers/developers drive more revenue and increase user retention with ads monetization . She is an Account Management Director, responsible for helping North American and LATAM publishers maximize ads monetization at Pangle . Previous to her role at Pangle , she managed the North American Developer Relations team at Tapjoy.
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