Six ways to put your holiday gift guide in front of shoppers

If you build a holiday gift guide each year, it is probably a few collections such as gifts under $25, gifts for him and stocking fillers. Then the guide sits in the menu, where shoppers have to go looking for it.

This guide shows six ways to put that gift guide in front of shoppers while they browse, using messages in the feed, gift picks they can add to cart, and rules that match each gift to the page and cart. Each section says which Atomato plan it needs.

You will finish with a plan you can set up this month and schedule for November and December.

1. Build the gift collections in Shopify first

Atomato points shoppers to your gift guide. It doesn't build it. Create the collections in Shopify first, one per price band or recipient, and give each a clear address such as /collections/gifts-under-25. Clear addresses matter later, because targeting rules match on the page path.

Keep the list short. Six collections or fewer lets each one have its own message in a single feed campaign on Scale or Enterprise+.

2. Give each gift collection its own message in the feed

A NotiFeed campaign adds messages to the feed that shoppers open from the bell. On Scale and Enterprise+, one campaign can hold up to six messages, so each gift collection can have its own message with its own button link.

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Point each Button link at the collection itself, not the home page. A click to a product, collection or search page gives shoppers 6 hours to add something to cart for it to count toward the message. A click to another page, such as the home page, gives 3 hours. The checkout then has to happen in the same browser within 30 days.

On Starter, the free plan, a campaign holds one message and only one NotiFeed campaign can be active. Use that message for the gift guide as a whole and link it to a hub collection or page.

3. Put gift picks shoppers can add to cart in the feed

NotiSell shows up to six products in the feed, and shoppers pick a variant and add to cart from the message. It needs Scale or Enterprise+. For a gift guide, use the Manual method and pick up to six gifts yourself, rather than letting best sellers fill the slots.

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A few settings matter for gifts:

• Purchase type: choose One-time purchase so subscription-only products stay out of a gift list.
• Add product to the cart: with it ticked, the button adds one unit of the chosen variant and opens the cart page. Unticked, it opens the product page.
• Offer incentive: optional. It creates a Shopify automatic discount that applies only to the listed variants added with the NotiSell button. Keep Add product to the cart ticked, or shoppers pay full price.
• Smart sorting: on product pages, it puts products Shopify marks as complementary to that product first.

The list doesn't refresh on its own, and Atomato doesn't check stock before it lists a variant. Check your picks each week in December. The help article on recommending products with NotiSell covers each setting.

4. Match the gift to the page and the cart

Targeting rules work on every plan. They let a message show only on certain pages, on one device type, or when the cart matches a condition. Three rules fit a gift guide well:

• Page URL Contains /collections/gifts: shows a message only on your gift collections, so shoppers already browsing gifts see the related picks.
• Cart value Is lower than an amount: suggests lower-priced gifts to shoppers whose cart is below your free shipping threshold. It compares the cart total in the shopper's currency without converting it.
• Cart items Is greater than 0: keeps a message away from empty carts.

When a feed message waits on a cart rule, it moves above your other NotiFeed messages once the cart matches. The feed doesn't open by itself. For more combinations, see how to target on-site messages by cart value.

A worked example: a stocking filler message

Say your store offers free shipping over $60, and you have a collection at /collections/stocking-fillers.

Before: one feed message for the whole season, titled "Holiday gift guide", linking to the home page. Every shopper sees the same message, and a click gives them 3 hours to add to cart for it to count.

After: a gift guide campaign on Scale with four messages, each linking to its own collection. One of them is the stocking filler message:

Title: Close to free shipping? Add a stocking filler

Description: Small gifts from $8 that make a thoughtful extra. Orders over $60 ship free.

Button: Shop stocking fillers, linking to /collections/stocking-fillers

Its rules are Cart value Is lower than 60 and Cart items Is greater than 0, with all conditions. It appears once a shopper has something in the cart, and it leaves the feed when the cart reaches $60. Use your own prices, threshold and collection.

5. Set the dates once for the whole season

On Scale and Enterprise+, the Schedule tab sets a start and end for the campaign. The schedule belongs to the whole campaign, not to each message, so put messages that should run on the same dates in the same campaign. Times follow your computer's time zone, so check them against your store's.

A simple plan is one gift guide campaign from early November to your last shipping date, then a separate campaign for gift cards and digital gifts after that. Our post on holiday shipping cutoffs covers the messages for those deadlines. On Starter, scheduling is locked, so set the campaign Active when the season starts and pause it when it ends.

6. See which gift messages earn their place

On every plan, each NotiFeed campaign has a summary page with a Performance by message table. It ranks messages by attributed revenue per 1,000 impressions, so a message that is shown more often doesn't rank higher just for that.

Performance by messageMessages ranked by revenue per 1,000 impressions, so high-volume campaigns do not look better just because they ran longer.

Feed message	Links to	Impressions	Clicks	Revenue / 1k
Free shipping over $50	Sale Collection			--
Back in stock: Canvas Tote	Canvas Tote Product			--

A message under 1,000 impressions is still ranked, so one early order can put it at the top. Different rules reach different shoppers, so a gap between two messages doesn't prove one works better. On Scale and Enterprise+, the Notisell tab on the Analytics page shows attributed revenue for NotiSell, and Atomato tags orders that include a product added with the button as notisell in Shopify.

Attributed revenue means an order followed a click under these rules. It doesn't prove the message caused the sale. If a message gets few clicks after a week, rewrite it or point it at a different collection.

What this setup doesn't do

• No gift quiz or recipient picker. Shoppers choose a collection or product from the message.
• No targeting by browsing history, location or new versus returning visitors. Use page, cart, device and UTM rules, or Shopify customer segments for signed-in customers.
• No bundles in one click. A NotiSell button adds one variant at quantity 1, then opens the cart.
• No messages on checkout or the thank-you page. Atomato shows on your storefront pages.
• No split testing. To compare two versions of a gift message, run them one after another and compare the same number of days.
• No schedule per message. Split messages into separate campaigns when they need different dates.

Next step

Create your gift collections this week. Then build one NotiFeed campaign with a message per collection, and add a NotiSell campaign with your top six gifts if you are on Scale or Enterprise+. Preview both, test the cart rule in a private window, and schedule them alongside the rest of your Black Friday Cyber Monday plan.

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