BFCM & Holiday Ads 2024: Tips and Strategies to Deploy Now to Improve Performance & Profitability
As the dust settles on another Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) season, we’re taking a moment to reflect on key strategies, challenges, and insights gleaned from the action-packed days. Whether you’re scaling ad budgets, fine-tuning creatives, or managing consumer behavior expectations, here’s a detailed breakdown of what the Foxwell Digital team (and Foxwell Founders Members) encountered, and tips you can apply to optimize your next big sales event.
1. Creatives: Simplicity Wins the Scroll War
Key Insight:
Static images with bold, clear sale messages outperformed intricate videos and carousels. Consumers on BFCM aren’t here to browse—they’re hunting for the best deals – as quickly as possible –and your creatives should cater to that.
What Worked:
Straightforward Statics: Minimalistic designs with vibrant backgrounds and large, easy-to-read sale messages (“25% OFF – Shop Now”) grabbed attention and converted well.
Price Before-and-After Graphics: Showing the discount visually with slashed pricing encouraged faster decision-making.
Overlay on Product Images: Highlighting what’s being sold (“Cozy Winter Jacket - 50% Off”) streamlined the consumer's thought process.
Pro Tip: Use tools like Canva to whip up quick and effective creatives. Skip the fancy animations—simple and direct gets the job done.
2. Consumer Behavior: Patience Pays Off
Key Insight:
The traditional BFCM surge is evolving. Consumers are holding out, researching, and comparing deals more than ever before. Many add items to carts early but delay purchasing, waiting for potential last-minute discounts.
Strategies to Combat Hesitation:
Transparent Messaging: Clearly state, “This is the best deal you’ll get!” or emphasize limited stock to create urgency.
Timing transparency: Let them know exactly when the sale ends or exactly when the shipping deadline to get in time for Christmas or another holiday
SMS Pushes: Timing is everything. Push notifications during high-purchase windows (mornings and evenings) can capture procrastinators.
Launch Newness: Pair discounts with exclusive product launches or limited-edition collections to give hesitant shoppers a reason to act.
3. Meta Ads: Budgeting and Scaling Tactics
Challenge:
Under-spending or overspending on campaigns is a common issue during BFCM or any short sale window. Meta’s algorithms often struggle to align spend with pacing goals, particularly with Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC), and also often struggle to hit spend minimums or maximums if budgets are changing multiple times throughout any given day.
What Worked:
Cost Cap Tweaks: Slightly raising cost caps early in the day allowed campaigns to spend efficiently, with room to scale back later.
Manual Restarts: Relaunching campaigns or converting ASCs to standard campaigns jump-started sluggish ad sets.
Daily Adjustments: Key scaling moments were identified around noon and late afternoon, based on spend pacing and consumer activity.
Lifetime budget: Especially for events like Cyber Monday when people shop more in the evening after work, lifetime budgets for just those hours can be helpful to maximize efficiency and target spend during peak hours.
Pro Tip: If your campaign is under-spending, consider temporarily removing spending caps or running a retargeting-only campaign to maximize frequency with warm audiences.
Not ready for a membership, but love these advertising best practices? Sign up for our free email newsletter!
4. Data Lag: Navigating Uncertainty
Challenge:
Many advertisers noticed significant data lags on Meta during BFCM, making real-time decision-making difficult. Without third-party attribution tools, tracking campaign effectiveness required extra caution.
Solutions:
Focus on blended ROAS (site-wide Return on Ad Spend – all marketing spend divided by all revenue) instead of relying solely on platform metrics.
Cross-check total revenue against daily ad spend. If revenue is climbing proportionately, your campaigns are likely driving results.
Pro Tip: Avoid over-risking by doubling/tripling, etc., ad spend blindly. Incremental increases (10-15% on small-to-medium accounts or 5-10% on larger accounts) are safer and still allow for scaling based on performance trends.
5. Consumer Trends: The Power of Discounts
Insight:
Smaller discounts (20% or less) didn’t create much buzz or intent to purchase. Instead, brands combining deeper discounts (40–50%) with exclusivity—like a new product line or limited-time collections—saw the best results.
Effective Strategies:
Early Communication: Start teasing deals weeks in advance to build anticipation.
Bundle and Save: Highlight bundled savings to boost average order value.
Clarity Is Key: Ensure your discounts and deals are front and center in all ad creatives and messaging.
Pro Tip: Emphasize scarcity, limited-time offers or exclusive collections create urgency without needing deeper discounts.
6. Black Friday ASCs: The Comeback Kid
Observation:
Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns made a surprising resurgence, delivering efficient performance for brands that leaned into them. However, flexibility and close monitoring were essential.
Tips for ASC Success:
Adjust Existing Customer Caps: Depending on goals, a 10–30% cap on targeting existing customers worked well to balance new and returning audiences.
Another pro tip here was to launch an ASC with a higher existing customer budget cap (like 30%), then lower it gradually throughout the sale to target more existing customers at the start of the sale and more brand-new customers towards the end.
Static Over Video: Generally ASCs performed best when paired with static sale-focused creatives.
Evergreen top-performing Videos: Though statics did outperform videos overall, the best videos were top-performing videos in the account year to date with lots of data and social proof in them, as well as those same videos re-uploaded with a banner overlay with the sale information or the same video as-is but with sale ad copy.
Recommendations for Your Next BFCM
Start Early, End Strong: Consider stretching sales over a week to maximize consumer touch points, but maintain urgency with end-date reminders.
Focus on Messaging: Be upfront about deals and stock availability to guide hesitant shoppers.
Experiment Strategically: Use this high-traffic period to test creatives and campaign types, but avoid introducing entirely new platforms or products.
Test during Q1-Q3: Use best-performing data from the entire year to know what structures, creatives, offers, etc. are most likely to work. Don’t reinvent the wheel – use what you know and what the data says is best for your account.
By adopting these insights and tips, you’ll be better prepared to navigate the fast-paced and competitive landscape of BFCM. Remember, it’s all about clarity, timing, and understanding your consumer’s journey.
Don’t feel alone as an ad buyer! The Foxwell Founders Community has channels to specifically support you as an ad buyer and marketer no matter your role – we have channels for in-house advertisers and brand owners, for freelancers and contractors, hiring, conversion rate optimization, creative, creative strategy, Google ads, TikTok ads, and so much more. We’d love to see you there!