Sign in with Google India’s festive season, from Onam to Diwali, is a major consumer spending period annually. Last year, festive e-commerce rose 12% year-over-year to $14 billion in gross merchandise value.
To connect with shoppers this festive season, brands need to act on the latest trends in customer purchase journeys.
New research shows that consumers are searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping seamlessly and simultaneously. And across these 4S behaviours, consumers in India report that Google and YouTube are the platforms that meet them in their nonlinear purchase journeys.
To help you hone your festive marketing strategy for the upcoming festive season, we’ll share key insights about the 4S behaviours of customers in India.
We’ll also explore how Google AI is supercharging customer purchase journeys and how AI-powered marketing can help you grow seasonal sales and profits.
How to influence customers in their 4S behaviours: Google and YouTube
To help customers find and choose your brand while they’re searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping this festive season, you’ll need to be where discovery starts and decisions are made — Google and YouTube.
When it comes to searching: Google and/or YouTube are present in 87% of the journeys where consumers said they discovered a new brand, product or retailer.1
Besides satisfying the search for inspiration, Google also helps consumers cross-check information and make decisions as they search.
For streaming and scrolling: Surveyed viewers in India rank YouTube as the No. 1 platform for streaming video content, outperforming all competitors including streaming platforms.2
That’s because YouTube offers immersive experiences across devices, from mobile to YouTube on connected TV (CTV).
And YouTube’s diverse content, across genres and formats, from long-form videos to Shorts, keeps audiences engaged as they stream and scroll.
Source: Google/Kantar, India, Short-form Video Deep Dive, n=1,200 adults aged 18-65 who watch short-form videos at least monthly, Oct. 2024.
When it comes to shopping: Google’s multimodal search capabilities and YouTube’s rich ecosystem of creators make them essential to consumers making purchase decisions.
Source: Google/Ipsos, India, The Relevance Factor, n=999 online shoppers 18+ who used the following online resources for their shopping, March 2024.
So, to win the upcoming seasonal sales, have your brand show up on Google and YouTube, which consumers in India rely on throughout their nonlinear purchase journeys.
How to grow sales with AI-powered journeys and ads on Google and YouTube
Besides influencing consumers across their 4S behaviours, Google and YouTube are also transforming customer purchase journeys.
Supercharged by AI, Google and YouTube are making everything from the way people search to how they shop ever more intuitive and immersive.
And you can take advantage of those innovations to drive better results by tapping into AI-powered marketing.
When it comes to searching: AI is opening up new and exciting ways for people to discover products and information.
With AI Overviews, for example, people are searching more, are more satisfied with their results, and visit a greater diversity of websites, leading to higher-quality clicks for your brand. Already, AI Overviews has scaled to over 1.5 billion global users every month.3
- Tap into AI Max for Search campaigns: It lets you power up the performance of your Search campaigns by expanding your reach into new queries that you weren’t accessing before. It’ll also intelligently adapt your ad content to match emerging user intent in real time, so that your ad stays highly relevant.
Cashify, an e-commerce platform for used smartphones in India, used AI Max for Search campaigns to broaden its audience reach efficiently.
Its test campaign used AI Max features like search term matching, text customisation, and final URL expansion to optimise its ads and achieve better business results.
For streaming and scrolling: Innovative developments on YouTube, including interactive experiences via YouTube on CTV, can help your brand better reach and engage customers across screens and devices this festive season.
- Explore Shoppable CTV: An interactive product feed powered by the Google Merchant Centre, Shoppable CTV lets viewers easily browse and shop products directly from their TV screens while watching YouTube on CTV.
- Tap into partnership ads: Collaborating with influencers on YouTube can help you grow your festive sales, given that 87% of surveyed viewers in India agree that YouTube has the most trusted creators for product recommendations while shopping, outperforming the competitive average (78%), which includes Facebook, Instagram, and Moj MX Takatak.4 Partnership ads let you use YouTube creators’ videos in your ad campaigns to build stronger connections with customers and expose your brand to new, receptive audiences.
When it comes to shopping: Google’s AI-powered retail solutions help high-intent festive shoppers easily find and purchase your products, wherever they are across Google properties.
- Use Google’s Commerce Media solutions: It lets you tap into first-party retail data from India’s top media networks, so you can reach every shopper on Google and YouTube who’s looking for your brand this festive season, and seamlessly shorten their journey to purchase.
- Use product feeds with Demand Gen campaigns: The solution lets audiences easily discover products most relevant to their needs, and purchase them directly from your ads.
The purchase journeys of customers might be nonlinear and unpredictable, but reaching and converting them doesn’t have to be complex.
By tapping into AI-powered marketing with Google and YouTube, which have unmatched influence across the 4S behaviours of customers, you’ll be well-placed to grow seasonal sales this festive period.
