How To Prepare For Traffic Spikes During BFCM With Boost

Ellie Ho

June 17, 2024

October 23, 2023

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7 min read

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Updated in Oct 2023.

Two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically changed the traditional Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) landscape from a one-day shopping sprint into a season-long deals marathon. However, this doesn't mean retailers can let their hair down and be worry-free about traffic spikes.

The holiday season is always peak traffic season. Without careful preparation, it's easy to step on the slippery slope with laggy sales pages, out-of-stock inventory, and revenue loss.

Boost AI Search & Discovery can give you a hand in getting your Shopify stores ready for traffic spikes during BFCM. Keep scrolling to know how we can do it.

Dig In Your History Data In The Analytics Reports

It's essential to review your statistics on a weekly or biweekly basis to get a good grip on the numerous ever-changing aspects of your online store. When going through the data, develop a habit of:

looking for sudden increases or decrease
keeping an eye on top-performing and worst-performing indexes
comparing them to earlier data.

Boost's Analytics dashboard has 4 main tabs: App Impact, Search, Collection, and Recommendation.

Regarding the Search analytics, we highly recommend you to:

Compare the number of searches made over the previous week, two weeks, and month
Take note of how the quantity of searches varies based on the weekday or month
Analyze the graphs for irregular highs and low
Watch out for unexpected dips or predicted increases during marketing campaigns

One particular report you may want to look closer at is the “Search terms without results”. There are plenty of opportunities to leverage this dead-end. Here are some examples from our users.

During BFCM, shoppers usually search for BFCM, Sale, and Discount so the merchant added a redirect for these keywords to the sales landing page.
Another user noticed that many customers were looking for a vendor that they were not providing at that time. This was a hint for them to expand their product categories. They actually started connecting with the vendor and actually selling their products after that.

Switching to the Collection analytics, you may find some ideas to optimize the design and layout of your website and landing page.

We provide "Total filter clicks" (both globally and for a specific collection) and "Top filter option values" on the Collection Analytics tab (as per specific collection). As a result, you can see which collections shoppers are more interested in, and which ones get little attention. The revamp of the navigation menu will benefit greatly from this information.

You should display the most popular collections on the navigation bar as this design feature receives the greatest attention in terms of user interaction. Furthermore, collections that don't get a lot of hits should be hidden in a submenu utilizing the hover effect. It prevents clogging your homepage and overwhelming your consumers with too many choices.

"Top filter option values" is a list of the most popular characteristics that customers use to shortlist the available options. You may determine which features of your offerings are most appealing to shoppers by glancing at the list. Then, rearrange the filter tree to the customers' preferences.

Also check out these BFCM materials:

Arrange Important Sync Procedures Beforehand

The inability to update your back-end changes (number of inventories, sales prices, etc) to the front-end on time is a huge turn-off for profit. A restocked item but still labeled as out-of-stock is a missed opportunity during the holiday season.

The opposite can be even worse. When shoppers can still purchase out-of-stock products just to get an apology email later on for the fact that this product is no longer available, it's like putting them on an emotional roller coaster without their approval.

Therefore, Boost is equipped with a high-performance infrastructure. We also separate different Sync options to speed up the entire process for each store. The app syncs and updates your changes within minutes so shoppers can browse through a sea of product listings in a matter of milliseconds.

With Sync schedule, you can preset a particular sync type to be triggered. It comes in handy for sync options that do not automatically start such as Sync multiple-language data, Sync multiple-currencies data, and Sync product item custom layout.

By default, our app runs auto-sync for recent updates with the app settings every 3 minutes, and every 7 days for best-selling product data. As a result, you may not need to schedule a sync process for these options unless you have other plans.

Automate Upselling & Cross-selling Strategies

Automation is merchants' best friend when running promotion campaigns. It saves you a lot of time since you just need to set up the rules and things'll run as expected. During the year-end sale, there are many unexpected tasks that require your attention, for example, tricky questions from fastidious customers. That's why you should automate things as much as possible.

Boost AI Search & Discovery (previously Boost Product Filter & Search) offers search merchandising and collection merchandising to automatically inspire purchases and drive conversion. Unlike your brick-and-mortar space, the space for online upselling and cross-selling is limitless. Here are some suggestions to use Boost’s merchandising capabilities to their greatest potential and turn your eCommerce presence into a high-performing sales channel.

Successful merchandising entails putting the most pertinent things on display at the ideal time and location at the right cost. To achieve this, a variety of elements are taken into account, including consumer journey, current sales, brand images, and product promotions. We have built attribute-based merchandising for this purpose.

This feature allows users to either boost or burry a particular group of products based on common attributes. You may set up merchandising rules for a range of various characteristics, such as high or low stock availability (high or low), recent trending products, size availability, high-margin items, items with great reviews, or best sellers.

One-piece beachwear is promoted on top of the search results.

Another tool you can use to automate upsell and cross-sell for BFCM is Collection merchandising. Merchandising for collection pages allow you to align the product order with business objectives, promoting the most appropriate products in potential collections on the customers' shopping journey.

Our Merchandising tools go with a date range picker so you can set up strategies in advance.

Utilize Boost's Partners Network

One of our competitive edges is the partnership with a wide range of leading Shopify apps in many categories like page builders, mobile app builders, product reviews, loyalty, multi-lingual apps, and so on. They are perfect assistants for your year-end or any sales campaign. Working together, we can have you boost sales on landing pages, and on mobile devices, and enhance customer relationships.

GOOD NEWS FOR YOU

Our #BFCM23 deal opens up only once a year with the biggest offer ever. This year, Boost joins forces with GemPages, Vajro, Growave, Langify, and more than 30 other Shopify apps to bring Shopify merchants the best package for your year-end sales.

If you don’t want to wait for another year, go on and claim yours now!

It's Time To Turn Peak Traffic Into Peak Sales

It's just several weeks till the largest sales of the year but it's never too late to prepare a well-executed campaign. Boost AI Search & Discovery and our partners can definitely help you with this.

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Ellie Ho

•

Content Marketing Specialist

June 17, 2024

•

7 min read

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How To Prepare For Traffic Spikes During BFCM With Boost

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