Meta's Holiday Readiness Tips: Boosting Your Ad Campaigns for the Festive Season

With the holiday season fast approaching, businesses are gearing up to make the most of the festive shopping frenzy. Many of our brands are allocating a large portion of their holiday promotional budget to Meta. To ensure that we are optimizing the setup of our Meta campaigns, we spent some time with Meta’s Holiday experts. In this blog post, we'll dive into Meta's Holiday Readiness tips to help you maximize your advertising effectiveness during the holiday season.

Campaign Strategies

  1. Adv+ Campaign vs. Manual Campaigns: To ensure detailed targeting, Meta suggests considering both Adv+ campaigns and manual campaigns for the holiday season. As many marketers know, there are pros and cons for each type of campaign; the choice depends on your specific business needs and how detailed you want to get with your targeting. In general, Meta favors Adv+ campaigns, but they recommend a manual campaign for smaller businesses with a smaller budget.

  2. Budget Allocation: When it comes to budget allocation, Meta recommends a balanced approach, splitting your budget across different funnel stages. This will help you address customers at various points in their buying journey effectively. They also recommend setting the budget at the campaign level–not the ad set level–as this helps the algorithm optimize the ads and get the campaigns out of the Learning Phase quicker.

  3. The Broader the Better: Broader set campaigns on Meta are more effective due to advanced AI capabilities and data collection, allowing for expanded audience targeting and lower CPA, while still delivering strong results. Meta highlighted numerous times that building campaigns with a wider net initially allows the AI (whether it be an Adv+ campaign or you use Adv+ audience) to find the best-performing audience for you.

Understanding Holiday Shopping Behavior

Meta's data reveals key trends and insights that can be leveraged to capture the attention of holiday shoppers. These insights include an increased preference for mobile shopping, with users frequently accessing social media platforms on their smartphones for product discovery and shopping. Additionally, the data highlights the importance of creating visually appealing and interactive ad content, as users are more likely to engage with and convert when presented with engaging visuals and interactive features. Furthermore, shoppers tend to be more receptive to personalized offers and recommendations, indicating the significance of tailored ad campaigns during the holiday season. By tapping into these insights, advertisers can craft highly targeted and visually appealing ad experiences that resonate with the evolving behaviors of holiday shoppers on Meta's platforms in 2023.

Audience Targeting During the Holidays

  • CPC Increase Estimate: Although CPC may increase during the holiday season due to heightened competition, Meta expects it to be manageable this year in comparison to last. The platform has improved its AI to offer more effective ad placements and improved signaling.

  • Conversions and Signal Issues: In the past, there were difficulties converting due to signal issues during the holiday season. However, Meta's improved AI capabilities are expected to deliver better results this year.

Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM)

  • CPA Increases: Be prepared for potential CPA increases during BFCM. It's a high-demand period, and people are making more purchases.

  • Steady CPA Through the Holidays: Following best practices and taking advantage of Conversion API and Adv+ audience should help maintain a steady CPA throughout the holiday season.

  • Brand Awareness Campaigns: Running upper-funnel brand awareness campaigns 4-8 weeks before BFCM is recommended to build momentum.

  • Optimizing for Conversions: One week before BFCM, focus on optimizing your campaigns for the final conversion push.

  • Post-Holiday Engagement: After the holidays, re-engage with audiences who visited your website but didn't purchase. Offer special post-holiday deals to convert them while keeping CPA low.

Balancing BFCM and Christmas

Meta advises having fewer campaigns with more budget and a higher inventory of ads, rather than segmenting out BFCM and Christmas. This approach will likely yield better results.

Best Practices for the Holidays and Campaign Types

  • Performance and Signal: Signal quality is paramount for campaign success. Meta's AI is now better at identifying the best customers for your products.

  • Conversions API: Utilizing Conversions API alongside the Pixel can significantly reduce CPA and help you find more valuable customers.

  • Audience Expansion: Thanks to AI and data collection, expanding your audience can lead to better campaign performance and lower CPA, especially now with Meta’s Adv+ audience option.

  • Fast Learning Phase: To reduce inefficiencies, set the budget at the campaign level and keep campaigns straightforward to achieve a faster learning phase.

Creative, Account Structure, and Measurement

  • Budget Allocation: Meta recommends a balanced approach between broad and more targeted campaigns, as the platform's new narrative is to be broader in audience targeting.

  • New Products for E-commerce: Meta has introduced the Advantage+ Audience, a new product designed to automate ad delivery and expand your reach. It's a new feature, so consider testing it, though it may not be suitable for smaller businesses initially.

  • Creative Strategies: During the holiday season, text overlays with clear CTAs and a sense of urgency (e.g., "30% off until Monday") work well. Diverse assets allow the system to optimize ad performance. Fill your campaigns with many assets so that you can turn off the underperforming ads during BFCM rather than input new ads. This will allow for a quicker learning phase and will require less work on your part.

In conclusion, Meta's Holiday Readiness tips provide advertisers with a comprehensive strategy to make the most of the festive season. By following these guidelines and taking advantage of new features and insights, you can position your campaigns for success during the holiday season and beyond.

Holidays are an imperative time for DTC brands to generate revenue. Don’t overlook the impact of hiring an agency that is dedicated to maximizing the performance of your ads. Many of our clients come to us because they recognize the importance of a detailed paid media strategy to grow their brand, but don’t have the resources in-house to execute and manage it. If this sounds like the position you’re in, let’s chat.