For marketers, creators, and everyone in between, the holiday season is the biggest monetization opportunity of the year! Year after year, we see a spike in total sales during Q4 as well as an ever-increasing percentage of how many of these sales come from online retailers. That being said, every year comes with bigger and better opportunities for anyone selling/marketing online.
To take advantage of the influx of traffic and customer spending, it is essential to be prepared, organized, and ready to capitalize. Geniuslink has some great tools to help you do just that! With our many helpful features, such as Choice Pages, in-depth reporting tools, automatic localization/affiliation of your links, and more, you can make the most of the season and optimize your links for the best end-user experience.
Q4 Sales Spike
To illustrate growing sales during Q4, why don’t we take a look at how 2021’s holiday season fared?
According to eMarketer, “the 2021 US holiday season posted the strongest retail growth in more than 20 years!”
Total retail spending grew more than 16.1% year over year (YoY) to $1.221 trillion in Q4 of 2021. Brick-and-mortar sales surged 17.3%, while e-commerce rose 10.4%. With numbers in the trillions, even a small piece of the pie is substantial!
Despite our current recession and lots of economic uncertainty, experts still forecast the 2022 holiday season will consist of healthy consumer spending as well as a much more stable supply chain than the last couple of years. That said, preparing for this healthy spike during Q4 is vital, and by following some key steps below, can really help you boost your commissions during the holiday season.
Key Dates
Given the increased traffic during the holidays, it’s wise to keep note of a few dates so you can prepare accordingly.
Keep the following dates in mind when planning your promotions and marketing strategies:
- November 11. Veterans Day
- November 25. Thanksgiving
- November 26. Black Friday
- November 29. Cyber Monday
- December 25. Christmas
- December 26. Kwanzaa
- December 31. NYE
- January 1. New Years*
It’s also good to note that some retailers in particular participate heavily in online sales and promotions. It goes without saying that Amazon is an online shopping phenomenon and is gearing up to roll out their Black Friday deals and giving shoppers an early taste of the deals they can expect to see through Cyber Monday.
If you’re already using Geniuslink to localize and affiliate your links, we already know you are already well ahead of the game and set up for success this holiday season. Also, Amazon has a number of landing pages dedicated to deals and sales they are running throughout the holiday season, and with Geniuslink, our service can automatically localize and correctly affiliate links for not only products on Amazon, but also for landing pages. This means these special holiday landing pages are fair game for affiliate marketers; we call them Choice Pages!
Maximize your Holiday Commissions with Geniuslink
After taking advantage of holiday deal promotions with your affiliate partners you may want to audit your geni.us links next.
If you are actively using affiliate links on your site (or other places you share content) a best practice is to optimize and audit those links to ensure they will perform for you during peak seasons (ahem like Q4 months). Here are four tips our client success team at Geniuslink recommends for maintaining your links.
- With Geniuslink’s click reporting you can see which countries your traffic is originating from. If more than 10% of your total traffic originates from outside your own country we recommend signing up with Amazon’s Associate’s program, through which you can sell in up to 22 different countries. For more info on how to sign up visit our Amazon Associates Program Guide. This can improve your overall sales in Q4 by capturing any possible conversions originating from countries outside of your own.
- After you’ve signed up with Amazon, or if you already have an Amazon Associate account, did you know you can monitor link health such as out-of-stock or broken links, and update them with one click? We recommend running through your Amazon Link Health Monitor and working to clear up any of your products that are out of stock or no longer available, to ensure your customers can get the products you are promoting.This will save tons of time or missed commissions in Q4, time you could be using to promote your links!
- If you build links manually and place them on your site, you’ll need to use an Amazon disclaimer next to each image, such as “Buy on Amazon.” Check out our blog article on Link Cloaking and Amazon Compliance for best practices. For more reading enrichment, the Amazon Associates – The Ultimate Guide To Getting Your Account Banned is also highly recommended by us to ensure that you are up to date with Amazon’s terms of service. It’s best to be proactive with compliance here, we don’t want you to lose out on possible commissions by getting your account banned by Amazon during one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year!
- Finally, in order to organize your efforts we recommend using our group/override feature. This is useful for a few reasons. It allows you to measure the performance data of a set of links (after Q4 is over) and it can help you organize links based on where they are located on the internet (Youtube, various websites, specific site pages for performance tracking, etc.) for granular reporting. For more information check out Groups & Affiliate Overrides. In order for you to have year on year growth during Q4, there has to be a method for measuring the performance of your links after the end of each season, our group feature is a perfect way to compare stats and make improvements!
Whether this is your first holiday season as an affiliate partner or your 10th, it’s important to prepare your affiliate links ahead of time in order to make the most out of the busiest season of the year. You can take full advantage of inflated online shopping traffic by tailoring your content around holiday deals that are important to your audience (especially Black Friday and Cyber Monday). Pro tip: Don’t forget about special holiday landing pages, they are fair game and a great way to show your audience irresistible holiday deals!
Finally, be sure to frequent your Geniuslink dashboard to ensure you are taking full advantage of the season. Here, you can confirm your links are working and reporting correctly your products are in stock, you’re making the most of your international traffic, and more. As always, feel free to reach out to our client success team if you have any questions and we’ll be happy to address them. Happy linking and happy holidays!