4 Mandates For Facebook Advertising During Holiday 2015
INTELLIGENCE BRIEF | ID-BASED ADVERTISING
4 Mandates For
Facebook Advertising
During Holiday 2015
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This holiday season, consumer brand marketers should
prepare to ramp their spend at least 100 percent above
normal benchmarks, reserve a test-budget for mobile
commerce and test innovative direct-response ad units
like dynamic product ads and News Feed carousel ads.
AUTHORS
Harry Johnson, Director, Ad Innovation
Ben Weiss, Content Strategist
DATA ANALYSIS
Noah Slafer, Lead Ad Analyst
Ryan Mason, Senior Ad Manager
Matt Burton, Senior Ad Manager
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4 Mandates For Facebook Advertising During Holiday 2015
Introduction
The annual holiday shopping season is throttling up.
Below are key trends marketers should know this year.
SHOPPING STARTED EARLY, WITH PEAK SHOPPING
TIME APPROACHING RAPIDLY
While holiday shopping now occurs almost year
round, Epsilon surveyed 3,000 consumers in the
United States and found 70 percent of holiday
shopping will occur between October and December
15, 2015.
BRICK AND MORTAR COMPRISE THE MAJORITY
OF HOLIDAY SALES, THOUGH ONLINE SALES
KEEP GROWING
While consumers shop for the holidays more in-store
than online, Deloitte predicts online holiday sales
will grow 9 percent in 2015. Experian predicts 25
percent of all digital sales will occur during the
“peak week” of November 25 - December 1, which
includes Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
ONLINE SALES GREW FASTER THAN
IN-STORE SALES IN 2014.
Online sales: 6.8% growth over 2013
In-store sales: 4% growth over 2013
- National Retail Federation, January 2015
90% of SocialCode brand clients that deployed
Facebook spend during Q4 2014 committed budget for
MOBILE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER
Mobile a more important commerce channel this
year. IBM reports mobile accounted for roughly half
of all online traffic last year, and that Black Friday
mobile sales accounted for 28 percent of all online
sales, a figure forecasted to continue growing this
year. Mobile also continues to be a key research
channel. Facebook data show that more than half of
all in-store sales were influenced by mobile research.
Why market to known audiences
this holiday season?
Scaling holiday media budget on ad platforms like
Facebook and Instagram -- tied to known consumer
IDs -- is an excellent way to drive sales efficiently
when holiday research and buying happens across
multiple months, devices and physical/virtual
locations.
Since marketers are targeting known audiences on
these platforms, marketers can:
Make their holiday creative more relevant
to audience segments
Maximize consumer response across
devices
Attribute in-store purchases to digital
ad exposures
For marketers that decide to invest in these “ID-based”
platforms, SocialCode has put together mandates
that will drive success with Facebook advertising
this holiday season.
Q4 2015 campaigns. 40% of this cohort pre-booked more
budget than they spent in Q4 2014. The median budget
increase among those advertisers was 13%
(Q4 2014 actual vs. booked Q4 2015).
We anticipate many of these trends will apply
to Instagram as well, and have mapped a
learning agenda to guide Instagram-specific
best practices.
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4 Mandates For Facebook Advertising During Holiday 2015
1. Justify higher delivery costs for
holiday sales campaigns with higher
Return on Ad Spend (RoAS)
SocialCode data from a sample of major U.S. retailers
and brands show that between October and Cyber
Monday last year, when bidding for actions in the
desktop News Feed, CPM costs grew 100 percent.
This makes sense, as competition (and therefore
price) increases during holiday time, when marketers
flood the platform to serve impressions to people
who converted in the past, and who have a full keyboard
and large display to browse and buy products.
spend surges were justified by an average 135-percent
increase in RoAS across all three events, compared to
non-holiday sales benchmarks.
FIGURE 2: RoAS Increases Justify Spend Increases,
SocialCode Client Sample, Holiday Season 2014
RoAS
Increase
Spend
Increase
Increase
RoASSpend
Increase
FIGURE 1: CPM Relative Cost Increase By Bid Type and Placement,
SocialCode Client Sample, Holiday Season 2014
125%
100%
75%
50%
Black Friday
25%
0%
October
Thanksgiving
Black Friday
Cyber Monday
Pre-Christmas
Cyber Monday
Thanksgiving
Weekend
Post-Christmas
-25%
-50%
Mobile Reach
Mobile Action
Desktop Reach
Desktop Action
Right-Hand Column Reach
These data show opportunity to start cycling holiday content into
campaigns immediately, as consumers increase their holiday-shopping
agenda and market prices are still stable.
Direct-response marketers that want to ensure their
holiday promotions reach the right people therefore
need more budget than non-holiday campaigns; an
expense justified by greater-than-normal RoAS.
To illustrate, SocialCode analyzed holiday data from
a sample of direct-response marketers that ran
large-scale campaigns in 2014. Clients increased
spend 424 percent from non-holiday benchmarks
on Black Friday, 1023 percent on Cyber Monday
and 387 percent on Thanksgiving weekend. These
2. Avoid cost spikes with mobile
advertising when running brand
campaigns
Marketers running brand campaigns that do not
generate direct revenue may think to pause campaigns
during the holidays to avoid higher market costs.
However, our CPM data from last year show campaigns
optimized for reach and served in the mobile News
Feed (a best practice for brand campaigns) maintained
relatively stable costs throughout the holiday season.
On Black Friday, for example, mobile CPMs were
only 3.96 percent higher than the November
average. By contrast, desktop CPMs were 60.45
percent higher compared to the November average.
Marketers can take advantage of increased marketplace
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4 Mandates For Facebook Advertising During Holiday 2015
activity while avoiding premium CPMs this year by
investing branding dollars into mobile and bidding
for reach rather than actions.
FIGURE 3: Mobile Versus Desktop CPM Percent Increase
During Thanksgiving and Black Friday, SocialCode Client
Sample, Holiday Season 2014
80%
60.45%
60%
40%
19.88%
20%
9.45%
0%
Thanksgiving
3.96%
Black Friday
Average Mobile Reach CPM, Percent Increase Over November Average
Average Desktop Reach CPM, Percent Increase Over November Average
3. Reserve test budget for mobile
commerce this holiday season
Secure, mobile payment solutions -- on platforms like
Messenger -- are growing in popularity, while mobile
devices are becoming bigger and mobile experiences
getting better. This mixture means people will soon be
able to make purchases as easily from mobile as they
can on desktop. Marketers should test how audiences
respond to mobile direct-response content when purchase
activity throttles up.
4. Use innovative ad types like dynamic
product ads and News Feed carousel
to amplify performance
DYNAMIC PRODUCT ADS
Dynamic product ads allow marketers with many
stock-keeping units (SKUs) to automatically serve
relevant Facebook ads, on any device, to qualified
people that visit their website. The process works
programmatically, triggering pre-designed creative
urging consumers to purchase the same or similar
items they previously viewed or added to their cart
on site. Dynamic product ads can also automatically
serve relevant items to people who recently made
a purchase (i.e. an accessory to match a piece of
clothing). This product creates an opportunity to
drive even better direct-response performance, especially
during periods of heavy consumerism like the winter
holidays.
One of SocialCode’s Fortune 500 retail clients has been
scaling the product since it launched, maintaining a
RoAS that is 10x higher than the brand’s direct-response
benchmarks, while increasing daily spend 4x per day
since launch.
FIGURE 4: F500 Retailer, RoAS With Dynamic
Product Ads, 16-Day Sample, September 2015
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4 Mandates For Facebook Advertising During Holiday 2015
NEWS FEED CAROUSEL
News Feed carousel ads give direct-response marketers
a way to display multiple products at once in a
side-scrollable unit, with multiple click points that drive
to unique offsite purchase pages. With the new addition
of video in the carousel unit, marketers have a suite of
tools to grab attention, build awareness and drive
conversion in one place.
This format proved highly valuable during a recent
online sales campaign of a major footwear retailer.
After testing carousel ads against single-image link
ads, we found a 2x RoAS lift and 61-percent lift in
clicks to the brand’s website.
When using carousel ads, it is best practice to tell
a cohesive narrative through the different creative
cells, rather than serving an assortment of random
products.
FIGURE 5: Major Footware Retailer, Carousel
Versus Link Ad RoAS, July 2015
Carousel Ad
Link Ad
Case study: F500 retailer drives
high holiday returns with offers
and urgency
SocialCode deconstructed one client holiday
campaign that spent more than $800,000
during the 2014 holiday season. While the
campaign was excellent from a performance
perspective, it was also attached to a rich
creative learning agenda, producing insights
like the following:
OFFERS DRIVE HIGHER ROAS
We served dozens of creative variations to different
audience segments. We grouped the creative into
three buckets: free shipping, miscellaneous offers
(i.e. free gift) and no offers. Creative with free shipping
and miscellaneous offers performed better than
creative with no offers. This indicates marketers
should test a variety of promotions ranging from
free shipping to percent discounts, free gifts and
buy-one-get-one to see which drives their specific
audiences to action.
URGENCY DRIVES ACTION
We then a/b tested each offer with one variation
emphasizing the offer’s end date and another
that did not. In 4/5 cases, creative emphasizing end
dates drove RoAS between 1.3-1.6x higher
than those without end dates. This suggests
urgent language emphasizing people take action
soon is a best practice during large holiday
campaigns.
RoAS
About SocialCode
SocialCode is a technology and insights company that manages digital advertising for the world’s leading consumer
brands. SocialCode’s automated advertising technology and strategic services group have enabled hundreds of
brands, including 30 of the Fortune 100, to maximize paid media performance and capture actionable insights
from consumer data on advertising platforms like Facebook®, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
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