Back-to-School’s Second Half: Understand These Five Audiences for Your Mid-Season Adjustments

Back-to-school represents one of retail’s biggest opportunities. The National Retail Federation estimates families will spend $875 per K-12 student this year, while college families invest over $1,300 per student. For marketers, this translates to a concentrated season where consumer intent peaks and budgets open up in ways they don’t during the rest of the year.

We’re now in the back half of BTS shopping season, but there’s still time to assess your initial campaign results and make final adjustments to your strategy. Early performance data should inform where you double down, which audiences need different messaging, and how you reallocate budget across channels for maximum impact in the remaining weeks.

The most successful brands this season meet shoppers wherever they are in their research and buying journey across search engines, social media, and retailers. This coordinated approach across paid search, social advertising, and retail media has quietly become the foundation of effective marketing, allowing brands to capture attention, build consideration, and drive conversions seamlessly across the entire shopping experience.

Knowing how your audiences are engaging online during their back-to-school shopping is key to making mid-flight adjustments across these channels to best impact your bottom line.

Know your back-to-school audiences

Different parent types have different shopping timelines, stress levels, research habits, and conversion triggers. They’re using social media, search engines, and retailer websites in completely different ways depending on where they are mentally in their shopping journey.

Here are the five distinct BTS audience types still actively shopping, and how you should be adjusting your commerce media campaigns based on how they’re engaging with each channel right now.

The stress-shopping early birds

These are the parents who had their act together from day one and started shopping in June and July, driven by everything from tariff anxiety to grant timing to pure Type-A personality traits. While their own shopping is largely complete, they haven’t disappeared from the ecosystem. Instead, they’ve transformed into the unofficial advisors and validators for the parents who are getting a late start in August.

The Stress-Shopping Early Birds – August Shopping Phase

The out of sight, out of mind procrastinators

These parents have been practicing avoidance as a coping mechanism all summer long, using psychological distance as a survival strategy. But now reality is setting in hard, and the panic is real, representing a significant portion of the remaining market opportunity for brands that can position themselves as the solution to their mounting stress.

The Out of Sight, Out of Mind Procrastinators – August Shopping Phase

The budget-minded parents

These parents approach back-to-school shopping with strategic financial planning, timing their purchases carefully with monthly budget cycles and often adding school supplies to regular household shopping trips to maximize efficiency and value. They represent a substantial opportunity for brands that can clearly articulate value propositions.

The Budget-Minded Parents – August Shopping Phase

The social media scouts

This group lives at the intersection of trend discovery and practical shopping, heavily influenced by social media content but validating their discoveries through search before making purchases. They represent the modern commerce media journey in its purest form, discovering on social, researching on search, and converting on retail sites.

The Social Media Scouts – August Shopping Phase

The quality-over-quantity converts

These parents have reached a breaking point with cheap supplies that break, wear out, or disappoint, leading to a “buy it right the first time” philosophy. They’re willing to pay premium prices for demonstrably better products, but they require substantial proof that the higher price delivers genuine value.

The Quality-Over-Quantity Converts – August Shopping Phase

Conclusion: back-to-school season is not over in August

The back half of BTS season offers a unique opportunity to optimize based on real performance data while significant shopping volume remains. Whether you’re amplifying the voices of Stress-Shopping Earlybirds, catching Procrastinators in crisis mode, or meeting Budget-Minded Parents with value messaging, success comes down to understanding how your audience is behaving across channels.

Apply this audience-first, multi-channel thinking beyond back-to-school to every season and category you market. Consumer behavior patterns remain consistent whether parents are researching school supplies or holiday gifts, using similar discovery, validation, and purchase patterns across social media, search engines, and retail sites throughout the year.

Skai’s Commerce Media solutions enable marketers to plan, activate, and measure campaigns across 200+ retailers, including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart as part of a broader commerce media strategy. AI-powered pacing, product intelligence, and keyword tools help teams meet shoppers across the journey and tie spend to sales with confidence.

Ready to optimize your audience targeting across all channels? Schedule a quick demo to see how Skai can help you orchestrate more effective commerce media campaigns