Every year around the holidays we see the consumer behavior changes along with Facebook ad performance. For publishers that track their page view rates some see spikes in visits, and others see dips. If you’re in the advertising business this means that you need to take into consideration consumers and their media consumption habits. For some advertisers, this is a fantastic opportunity to be topical and speak to the season. It’s no surprise that we sort some of the ads about gifts, offers and end of year sales. When people are traveling they may be spending more time or less browsing the site that they normally consume. In past years we’ve seen click through rates drop, costs per click increase and even access to inventory decrease.
This year during the Thanksgiving holiday I was expecting to find some challenges, so here are the results of the campaigns that I ran during the holiday week.
I’ll speak to Facebook ad performance on three campaigns that are running – video view, click and lead generation. To protect the specific performance details of my clients I’ll share reporting in terms of an index. 100 is the average, anything over is better performance and anything less is lower performance. 110 is better, 90 is worse.
For the cost per click campaign targeting five miles around an address the performance in the last week is at 107, meaning there’s a 7% improvement in performance this week as compared to the total for the month. On the day of Thanksgiving ad performance was actually higher, at 118, or 18% better than the month.
For the video view campaign, targeting a small number of professionals, Facebook ad performance during the week of Thanksgiving was 102, or 2% more efficient than the month. On Thanksgiving day the performance was 96, resulting in a 4% higher cost per view for the day.
Finally, for the lead generation campaign, we saw an increase in the number of leads come in by 200% during the week of Thanksgiving. Because this campaign is also targeting a small group of professionals and the lead cost is high, we have to caveat that this is not indicative of expected performance. However, I was surprised to see leads being generated so close to the holiday.
In summary, advertisers who are capitalizing on ad performance should take into account the holidays, travel habits by their consumers and access to inventory. Marketers targeting professionals by job title, for example, may yet see a downturn in opportunities to convert B2B leads during the latter part of December as more people take time off for travel.
For advertisers whose products and services support the holiday season, like restaurants, this is a great time to reach consumers, and even capture audiences who are otherwise so busy the don’t have time to interact with your business in digital environments.
