Marketing Guide for Christmas Ads in 2021｜ADCostly

As Mariah Carey's "All I want for Christmas is you" gradually sounded, the whole world began to realize that Christmas was coming.

The enthusiasm of Halloween is continued by the arrival of Christmas, making this planet shrouded in the gloom of the epidemic become warm. Thousands of people are eagerly looking forward to Christmas, and of course, advertisers are no exception.

From September 20th of each year to January 6th of the following year, major e-commerce platforms will enter the peak sales season. During this period, the total sales of the platforms account for almost half of the total annual share. This phenomenon shows that seizing the shopping wave brought about by the festival can largely determine the future direction of a store.

Businesses need to move advertising and marketing closer to Christmas in order to maximize the holiday effect and bring higher sales.

How to better carry out Christmas marketing? How to increase the click-through rate of Christmas ads? ADCostly brings the 2020 Christmas advertising cost report and the 2021 Christmas advertising optimization guide for advertisers.

Advertising costs during the Christmas period in 2020

In 2020, the epidemic has reduced advertising budgets, and certain areas such as tourism have remained sluggish throughout the year. But in the second half of 2020, political advertising spending and holiday season sales helped offset losses in the first half of the year, bringing annual revenue to $139.8 billion. However, the growth rate is lower than the 15.9% growth during the period from 2018 to 2019.

It can be seen that the spending on sales during the holiday season will be swift and violent in the second half of 2020, and the digital advertising part is indispensable.

ADCostly disclosed the advertising cost trends around Christmas, which is from December 2020 to January 2021.

According to ADCostly, the advertising costs from December 2020 to January 2021 are as follows:

Compared with October and November 2020 in the same period, CPM and CPC costs have increased during this period, and CTR has also increased. This has a lot to do with festivals such as Christmas. ADCostly provides the trend chart of these two different periods:

It can be clearly stated from the figure. CPM and CPC have been pushing up since December. The CPM has risen from less than 5.5% to $10.54, which is double the gap.

CPC and CTR also have a small straight rise.

From the perspective of gender and age, women’s CPM, CPC, and CTR are generally higher than men’s. People aged 13～17 have the lowest CPM and CPC costs; those aged 55～64 have the highest CPM and CPC costs; 45～54-year-old have the highest CTR.

From a national perspective, from December 2020 to January 2021, the higher the CPM cost in the United States, reached $24.9; South Korea had the highest CPC cost, reaching $2.49; Australia had the highest CTR, reaching 2.41%.

From the perspective of ad placement, the highest CPM ad placement is Audience Network Rewarded Videos, reaching $31.97; the highest CPC ad placement is also Audience Network Rewarded Videos, reaching $2.25; the highest CTR is Facebook News Feed, It reached $3.67%.

What you should know about advertising in 2021

For novices, those who are new to advertising may not understand the meaning of CPM and CPC cost. Here, ADCostly also gave the answer:

What are the factors affecting the cost of CPM?

• Scoring of historical accumulated data of advertising accounts
• The amount of interaction after the ad is placed
• Advertising schedule
• The advertising audience is too wide
• Ads always use a unified creative

When the seller’s advertisement is launched and the user’s interaction rate is very good, then the CPM will drop. Therefore, the cost of CPM means the effectiveness of advertising.

What you should know about CPC？

Different advertising platforms have different factors that affect CPC costs.

Let’s take Google ads as an example. There are many factors that affect your cost-per-click, including your targeting criteria, keywords, ad text, landing page, the maximum bid you set, and so on.

The CPC cost is related to the bidding prices of other advertisers. If you want to place an ad for a certain ad slot, you need to increase the ad bid, so that your ad can be successfully displayed if it exceeds the existing bid height.

Finally, the cost of CPC is also related to the CTR of the advertisement. The higher your advertisement CTR, the lower your CPC cost will be. Therefore, if you want to increase CTR and save advertising costs, you need to think about how to improve the quality of advertising content. This is the most fundamental factor.

6 tips to win in Christmas marketing campaigns in 2021

1. Add Christmas keywords to your ads

Keywords are very important to the effect of advertising because keywords affect the audience of the advertisement, the click-through rate and the exposure rate of the advertisement, and so on. So choosing the right keywords at Christmas can greatly increase your sales.

According to the data provided by ADCostly, the keyword "Christmas" has a total audience of 313.68M. The CPM is $10.53 and the CPC is $1.2. The United States, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom account for the top three audiences in the world. The United States has the highest CPM and CPC costs, and the Philippines has the lowest CPM and CPC costs.

In addition to "Christmas", ADCostly also captured 20 interesting words related to "Christmas" and 41 suggested words. Advertisers can adjust their advertising optimization strategies based on the keywords CPM, CPC, and KD (keyword difficulty) provided by ADCostly.

2. Exposure through social networks to attract more customers

Before Christmas, the entire social network is warming up for it. If your brand has an account on social networks, please show your products generously. The fans who accumulate social networks and launch discounts or preferential activities to give back to them before the holidays are very likely to become loyal users of the brand. This is beneficial to both the establishment of the brand image and the increase in sales.

3. Obtain more customers through KOL and KOC brand endorsements

In this era of concentrated discourse power, please don't ignore the power of KOL and KOC.

They have a large number of fans on social platforms, which is a very fast and effective way to increase brand exposure. KOL is a part of the people with the highest number of fans. Cooperation with them requires a high price, but the effect will be very obvious; KOC is those who have a moderate number of fans and are in the period of seeking cooperation to increase fans. Long-term cooperation with them can bring to continue an effective return.

4. Personalized custom Christmas gift packaging

The most important thing for Christmas is the atmosphere. Designing outer packaging with a Christmas atmosphere for your products will give customers a warm feeling. You need to think of the holidays as an opportunity to wow prospects and customers.

You can design a variety of packages and send them randomly, and write a holiday message for each customer to enhance the customer's consumption experience. Of course, please don't forget to design patterns and packaging according to your product type, and keep the style consistent.

5. Design a beautiful Christmas landing page for your website or page

For sellers who have their own websites like Shopify, please don’t neglect your website design. If you want to stand out at Christmas, you need to spend some time on decorations.

When your potential customers visit your website, the first thing they will see is the landing page. You need to think about how to make it more attractive, interesting, and interactive. You can also add a happy holidays video to your landing page. The data shows that adding holiday-related videos on the landing page can increase the conversion rate by 86%.

A well-designed landing page for your website will help you establish contact with potential customers. It will also stimulate the interest and holiday atmosphere of potential customers and motivate them to continue buying.

6. Christmas ads should elicit an emotional response.

For publicity and promotion at Christmas, please do your best to arouse the warmth in people's hearts and set off the Christmas atmosphere so that people are truly touched by your brand.
Impress consumers from advertising content, store activities, and product details, which is conducive to the long-term operation of the brand.

Merry Christmas!