Are Black Friday and Christmas Ads more expensive?

Are Black Friday and Christmas Ads more expensive?

Why is it that Black Friday and Christmas ads are said to be more expensive? Before you make any decisions about whether to do an ad for Black Friday or Christmas let’s bust some myths!

I hear people say that they are concerned that it may cost them more to run an ad for these occasions and they won’t see a good return on their investment. It worries me that some people may decide not to run these ads before they learn the truth.

A recent study from Shopify revealed that Facebook marketers view Facebook and Instagram as one of the top-performing marketing channels, especially for e-commerce brands. Simply put, more gets sold on these channels.

So, what this means is that over Black Friday and Christmas, there are going to be many more advertisers and marketers on these platforms. This puts up the costs per sale, sometimes by as much as about 25%.

Why do Black Friday and Christmas ads cost more?

Before I explain why this increase occurs, we need to look at how the Facebook Ad platform works.

When you're putting a Facebook ad on, you are essentially entering an auction. Think of it as going to an auction house where you are bidding for a certain audience to see your ads. Now consider that there are more advertisers who also want this particular audience, the bids keep going higher in an attempt to secure the sale.

As you can imagine over the Black Friday and Christmas season especially, business owners want to be showing their products and their offers to people. And at Christmas, business owners are looking to reach their end of year targets resulting in more and more companies looking to advertise on Facebook.

How to keep your ad costs lower.

It’s not impossible to keep your Black Friday and Christmas Ad costs lower – I bet that’s music to your ears.

Here’s some tips for how:

• Keep building your warm audiences in your audience section of Facebook ads manager - the people who are visiting your website, signing up to your email list for instance, using your messaging bot, watching your videos on your social media channels.

• Leverage these warm audiences. Start sending ads to customers and potential customers and get them over to your website and your offers now to segment even warmer audiences.

  • Start advertising your lead magnet before Black Friday or Christmas and build your email list.

  • Get more people onto your website by boosting a post that sends them to your website to read an engaging blog.

  • Send your best-performing organic posts from your Facebook page to a wider cold audience to get new traffic to your website.

  • A great way to build an audience quickly is to send out a video detailing top tips and really adding value to the cold audience. What you are doing here is capturing them to market to later.

• Don’t think of Black Friday and Christmas as the end of your advertising period. Post-Christmas and January are great times to keep advertising and the cost of ads drops too! Boxing Day sees incredibly high levels of people online – take advantage of that. People are keen to spend any Christmas money they've been given, and they're looking for bargains and sales.

• The Christmas season is a good time to raise your average order price around this time. Your average order price is how much you would normally make from an average order. Think about how can you increase that. Maybe do special bundles - could you make a special Black Friday bundle rather than a discount that seems like it's a better offer? Allow the customer to buy two or more products together to get a discount. This will get people spending more.

• Consider creating a landing page that only has special Black Friday or Christmas products on it to narrow their view and encourage a sale.

• Focus less on competitive audiences. There are some very common audience-targeting options that a lot of people choose, but to keep costs low think a little bit outside of the box for interests to target.

• Try some different placements. Many people use Facebook newsfeed or Instagram feed, but in actual fact you can sometimes get lower-cost sales if you only target Instagram Stories for instance, or Marketplace. To really make the most out of this use some really good creative that works with the different placement area (tailor your images to be the right size for Stories for instance with GIF images overlaid).

I hope that helps you to see that Black Friday and Christmas Ads don’t need to be expensive if you design your strategy now.

If you'd like any more information about how to run ads over this festive season, please do get in contact with me and we can have a chat. I’d love to hear from you.