The holiday shopping season is starting earlier and earlier. Pre-COVID, Amazon and omnichannel retailers started intense promotion in early November, but in 2022, the holiday season unofficially started with Amazon’s Prime Early Access Sale on October 11 and 12. This year’s Prime Day 1.0 and 2.0 provide not only with an opportunity to unload backed-up inventory, but also get real-time looks at the visual strategy changes that brands and retailers are employing this holiday season.

Visuals, especially those tuned to the preferences of your retail media targets, are a key difference maker for brands looking to convert on increased holiday-related organic and paid traffic. 

Below are five steps brands and retailers can take to optimize imagery to boost the traffic and conversion potential of their product detail pages for holiday shoppers this year.

Step 1: Understand the Visual Landscape for Your Category and Key Search Terms

Just like any other optimization initiative, it is imperative that brands take stock of the visual tactics that consumers are seeing across ecommerce marketplaces. It’s not enough to only look at hero images on search results pages—you must consider the carousel images on individual product pages as well. How many carousel images and videos will consumers see when they click into a listing? What types of visuals make up these carousels? What types of enhanced visual content (i.e., 360-degree images or videos) exist? What type of imagery is being used in banner advertising?

Step 2: Know the Visual Preferences of Your Retail Media and Product-Specific Audiences

Data-rich retail networks are offering brands extremely granular targeting, but to get the maximum value of this targeting, brands need a solid understanding of the visual preferences of these shoppers. This means brands will need to not only understand where these shoppers visit online, but also which patterns in images are most and least engaging to them. By applying AI-powered technology to the thousands of images and millions of interactions shoppers have with images every single day, brands can begin to understand the relative effectiveness of imagery that exists in a category landscape, as well as the preferences of their shopper audiences.

Step 3: Measure and Benchmark Your Images for Your Category and Key Search Terms 

Once the visual preferences of specific audiences are known, brands can begin to paint a picture of which specific hero images are best positioning listings for traffic, and which carousel images are best positioning listings for conversions, as well as which brands are best and worst positioned to win shoppers through their digital shelf imagery. This learning can then be used to establish a minimum standard of visual effectiveness for specific images and overall listings, guaranteeing brands a better chance at attracting and converting online audiences.    

Step 4: Review Your Current Image Libraries or Redesign Assets to Create More Visually Appealing Images

With your product page and listing imagery benchmarked, now examine the visuals that already exist in your brand’s PIMs and DAMs to surface the most impactful images for your online product detail pages and banner advertisements. Vizit’s real-time image analysis technology quickly evaluates and scores new concepts and designs as they are created to reveal the colors, angles, or scenery that drives engagement with and captures the attention of your audience.

Step 5: Monitor Visual Tactics and How Impactful Your Updated Images Are

In ecommerce, there is no such thing as “set it and forget it.” Brands have too many tools at their disposal—digital shelf monitoring, user-generated content platforms, and others—not to quickly make changes to perform better or maximize on trends. Continuously review the visual landscape over the holiday shopping season as carefully as you’d monitor the search and marketshare landscape. Proactively identify listings with underperforming visual content and make the necessary adjustments to avoid losing traffic and sales.

To succeed across the digital shelf, brands need the same level of easily accessible data on visual content that they have for their other ecommerce performance levers. Artificial intelligence-based visual analytics can help brands run these steps in near real time, with instant image measurement against the visual preferences of specific audiences. 

Following these five steps gives your brand unrivaled advantage, increasing traffic to and the conversion potential of your products with more impactful imagery. 

See for yourself. Schedule a 30-minute Vizit overview and receive a complimentary one-page benchmark report for one of your Amazon or Walmart search terms.