If you haven’t started planning, strategizing, and executing some sort of marketing and advertising plan for the holidays…LISTEN UP!
👉 Make sure your advertising friends see this!
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It’s time to start putting away those sandals and pulling out your favorite boots – the holidays will be here before we know it!
Below are some topics that are top-of-mind as we approach Q4.
I want you to be as prepared as possible for the busiest and most competitive time of the year on Facebook.
If Q4 isn’t a priority for your clients, I still recommend applying these strategies and best practices to your evergreen and long term strategies.
𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭, 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭, 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭
Reaching new customers gets more and more expensive the closer we get to Black Friday.
Consider ramping prospecting efforts NOW while there’s less competition and clutter in the marketplace.
20% of holiday shoppers say they start their holiday shopping in October or earlier.
This is a great time to get your clients’ brands in front of new people, so they’re top-of-mind when holiday shopping starts. A few tactics to consider:
✅ We recommend spending 70-80% of your FB budget on prospecting – consider increasing that to 90% over the coming weeks.
✅ Use split testing to A/B test new audience strategies. This could include different lookalike (LAL) strategies (i.e., LTV vs. recent purchasers), super lookalikes (combination of multiple LALs), interest targets, CRM lists and more.
✅ If you aren’t running Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) for clients with product catalogues, you should be!
In many cases, I’ve seen DABA outperform business as usual prospecting efforts.
DABA is powered by intent signals on and off FB that we can match back to products in their catalog.
People are searching for more types of products during Q4, so it’s critical to have DABA as part of your Q4 strategy to capitalize on all of that intent in the marketplace.
If you’d like to schedule a deep dive call on DABA – please let me know.
✅ If you’re already running DABA with success, consider scaling this campaign through the end of the year.
If you’re already using broad demo targeting (best practice), consider launching a second DABA ad set with a broad lookalike (i.e., 5-10% LAL of highest LTV customers) or a super LAL to scale your DABA success.
✅ Turn on advanced matching with ONE CLICK to track more conversions, build larger remarketing audiences and seed audiences for lookalikes, and get a more accurate measure of campaign performance.
✅ Consider testing new markets (i.e., Canada or Europe) as inventory can be cheaper and many international shoppers are familiar with Black Friday and are shopping heavily during that timeframe to take advantage of promotions.
𝐂𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐫, 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫
Ask yourself what’s more important – control or efficiency? I’m willing to bet most of you answered “efficiency.”
Our auction and delivery platform performs best when it has flexibility.
Flexibility comes in the form of your audience, placement, budget and creative strategy.
Think about all of the products Facebook has been bringing to market: DABA, campaign budget optimization, automatic placements, dynamic creative optimization.
The purpose of all of these is to remove delivery constraints and manual optimization, consolidate your campaign structure and let machine learning make more optimization decisions.
This means taking away more control from advertisers (scary, I know!) and trusting us to put the right ad in front of the right person on the right placement to achieve your campaign goals.
The advertisers who have embraced this shift (ex: Bombas) are reaping the benefits.
Some tips for adopting a consolidated campaign structure:
✅ Adopt a bid-to-budget ratio of at least 1-to-10, although our Auction team recommends 1-to-25 as a best practice.
✅ Use campaign budget optimization to set a campaign-level budget and let our algorithm dynamically allocate budgets between ad sets based on performance.
This saves you time and can help overcome under-delivery.
✅ Use automatic placements as much as possible! Try to avoid forcing our auction to deliver to only one placement.
✅ Consolidate audiences who have a similar value to your business. It’s better to have fewer ad sets with bigger budgets vs. spreading yourself too thin.
If Audience A has a CPA of $25 and Audience B has a CPA of $20, do they really need to be separated in two different ad sets?
This goes for retargeting too! Consolidate retargeting windows if they have similar performance.
𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐌𝐚𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐔𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐕𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐞
Holiday is the one time of year where people are buying for others more than themselves. (At least, most people are…)
This may require you to dial up different products, product benefits and messages to match this gifting mindset.
There’s also a ton of clutter across FB/IG as well as other media channels, so it’s more important than ever that your creative stands out in Feed.
✅ Consider different moments throughout Q4 and tailor your message accordingly.
For example, October messaging may be geared at the early “plan ahead” shopper, November messaging may be more promotional in nature or focused on a “one for me, one for you” type of message and December messaging may be driving urgency around last ship dates.
✅ Last week we rolled out several new visual merchandising solutions for the holiday season including dynamic ads creative tools, instant storefront templates and holiday-inspired templates and stickers in our video creation kit – check out this blog post for more.
✅ Within the next week or so, I’ll be sharing some holiday creative frameworks from our Creative Shop to serve as inspiration for holiday creative development.
As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions about the above strategies, and let’s continue to hone your holiday plans together in the coming
Useful Links:
Split Testing: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/1738164643098669
Advance Matching: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/611774685654668
Campaign Budget Optimization: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/153514848493595
New Ways to Showcase Your Products this Holiday Season: https://www.facebook.com/…/new-ways-to-showcase-your…
Adding More Choices for Video Ad Buyers: https://www.facebook.com/…/adding-more-choices-for…
Facebook Stories Ads: https://www.facebook.com/…/introducing-facebook-stories…
Updates to Targeting: https://www.facebook.com/…/keeping-advertising-safe-and…
New Requirements for Custom Audience Targeting: https://www.facebook.com/…/introducing-new-requirements…
4 Ways to Prepare for the Holiday Season: https://www.facebook.com/…/4-ways-to-prepare-for-the…
David Schloss is the founder of Convert ROI, a highly successful digital advertising agency focusing exclusively on Facebook and Instagram ads platform. His expertise is behind the psychology of running high yielding Facebook Advertising Campaigns whether that is through his fully managed private client work, consulting, intensive training events or keynote speaking.
