It’s never too late in the season for retailers to create efficiency and reduce operating costs by automating holiday digital marketing campaigns. With just thirty-one short days in December to make 23.8% of their annual sales, retailers must take advantage of every moment they can.

One of the Grinch-like thieves of time for retailers during the busy holiday shopping season is the continuous updating of product feeds that disperse products to price comparison websites, paid search affiliates, affiliate networks, online marketplaces, etc. As items go on sale, and hopefully, sell out completely, retailers must ensure they are providing a continual stream of products through their product feed. For deal-of-the-day sites like Offers.com, GroupOn or Gilt that can change out inventory multiple times per day, this can be especially difficult as they tend to have very little advanced notice as to what items will be featured in the near future.

The time constraints for retailers make it seemingly impossible to not just provide a product feed, but also to track the results of every conversion on each product sold through every website, display ad and seasonal offer email. However, automating product feed updates and ecommerce tracking can save retailers a ton of time, especially during the busy holiday season.

A comprehensive, intuitive, digital campaign management system that automates digital campaign tracking and helps retailers automate product feed updates can be the difference between success and failure. By simply making their XML product feed public on a server, retailers can have their digital tracking solution automatically deliver their product feed to their online partners and sites, helping them keep up with needed changes and still keep tracking conversions, all in real-time.

By not automating these processes, retailers will have to devote their most limited holiday resource, time, to actively managing their product feed and tracking results. This is not something retailers should need to stress over during their most opportune time of year. Instead, they should leave product feed updates and tracking to their digital campaign management solution.