3 Ways to Maximize your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) This Holiday Season

🎵 It’s the most expensive tiiime of the year 🎶

Every year, prices begin to increase right before Thanksgiving and continue to rise through Christmas Day. Why? Because it’s a time of increased competition! We are all competing for the same audience’s attention. Additionally, if companies have kept their ad budgets conservative throughout the year, it’s usually so they can spend more during the holidays. Everyone wants a piece of the pie!

With ad costs inevitably going up, what can you do to maximize your return on ad spend during the holidays? Here are three questions we get asked the most–and our recommendations for each.

Should we pause when ads are most expensive?

Our recommendations vary depending on the industry.

For non-ecommerce clients, we recommend frontloading budget in early October through the first week in December. You’re likely to see slight increases in success metric costs due to increases in competition during this time of year, however, higher costs will be more obvious by Black Friday.

For e-commerce clients, we suggest increasing spend during the prime holiday shopping weeks, focusing on mobile ads and highlighting products with video. 

Should we pause between Christmas & New Years?

Because of increased costs during the holidays, many people turn off advertising between Christmas and New Years, but we think this goes against most logic when it comes to e-commerce. After all, a lot of people are getting money for Christmas and will be eager to spend it. Additionally, costs tend to decrease significantly after Christmas, so you’ll likely be back to pre-holiday performance metrics during this time.

Anything else we should try to maximize ROAS?

If you’re typically throwing a “wide net” (ie: targeting a broad audience) for your advertising, consider these two options for holiday ads:

1) Leverage your internal potential and current client lists

2) Retarget your pixel-based audiences.

Though costs might not be cheap, you will be certain that you’re reaching the right people at the right time, which should amount to big returns on ad spend!

Got more questions about social advertising during the holidays? Give us a shout: (843) 631-6273.