direct response facebook advertising case study

Holiday sales during November and December months have long been heavy sales periods for online shopping.  In fact, advertisers are shifting spend in droves to Facebook ads for the holidays.  So how did our ads hold up for a seasonal consumer product that delivers warmth to your home, while competing against traditional gift-giving products?  

Using Facebook video advertising, we found that products outside of the gift product category are able to easily compete with other online shopping products that would be given as gifts during the holiday season.  Not only did this show that consumers shop for themselves during these months, but niche products, particularly ones highly relevant to the temperature in your home are able to compete with brute force.

While many are out shopping on ecommerce sites for gifts, seasonality which translates into a relevance scores in Facebook’s terms, over-rules all.  With relevance driving low costs clicks and high click-through-rates, Facebook views these stats per 1,000 people and gives you a rating based on how many actions were taken in order to calculate this number.  Audience and messaging also helps move the needle, but its been our experience that in order to get a perfect 10 for relevance score, you need 120-140 engagements per 1,000 impressions.  

Seasonal products are some of the riskiest in terms of forecasting sales, but at the same time – if advertised properly – will undoubtedly deliver high relevance scores which later translate into low costs across the board.

Deliver highly relevant ads to Facebook users by staying in tune with the seasons and properly targeting your impressions.  While holidays typically have increased costs due to demand, Facebook will reward its most engaged content with low costs to keep its daily user base happy with the content they are seeing.  Despite high competition, sales can still soar through the roof in the right type of scenario.  Keep in mind that irrelevant or boring ads equate to bad user experience and typically higher costs per conversion.  Not all products will do well through Facebook’s conversion objectives; however the right selling angles can benefit from the relevance boost to keep their ROAS in check.