Halloween checklist: a terribly good selection of ad tricks

According to Microsoft’s data, people start shopping for Halloween long before October 31. In fact, 45% of users are starting to shop for holidays as early as the first half of September! Not publishers nor advertisers have time to waste — but don’t let it scare you, as DecenterAds comes to the rescue with a Halloween checklist for both parties!

1. Spooky places 

US consumers spend significant sums of money celebrating the Halloween season. NRF’s analytics predict that 2022 season spending will hit $10.6 billion! And year by year, the most productive categories spend-wise are costumes, home décor, and candy.

Publishers, take note — there’s no need to organize a whole new website with those goods to get profit from the Halloween period. People look for ideas and inspirations as often as for decorations and stuff, so you can make your platform more engaging for the holiday with thematic, special-edition content. Or, the other way around, you can place your products on other platforms, such as Facebook Marketplace. Data from Meta points out that it’s a great place for catching last-minute shoppers and getting the most out of your Halloween season.

2. Ominous timings

Analyzing last year’s Halloween on DecenterAds, we came up with several useful statistics. First of all, the number of ad impressions per day peaked on October 31 with over 50 million ad impressions per day. Throughout the Halloween week leading up to and including October 31, growth trends are visible across all metrics, including requests per day from 49 million on October 28 to 60+ million on October 30-31. A proportional increase in CPM was observed, which reached its peak (+7.7% compared to the beginning of the holiday week) on October 30 and began to decline the very next day to return to the mark of the beginning of the holiday week by November 1.

With this data, publishers can understand what to expect from the 2022 Halloween season. And Advertisers — do take this into consideration and increase your ad activity between October 29 and 30. From October 31, don’t spend on positions marked “sale” or “hot offers” anymore, as they will no longer be relevant.

3. Terrif…ic strategies 

Ok, you got the data; but what to do with your bids to get the best results from your Halloween campaigns? According to Taboola, the best strategies include:

• modifying individual sites’ bids before blocking publishers when CPAs are high;
• increasing top-performing sites’ bids by 25%-50% to grow their competitiveness;
• choosing always-on campaigns for low budget and offering parameters;
• using automated bidding for the DSP to catch the best offers for you — low effort, high result.

4. Mysterious figures

Know your audience! According to Microsoft analytics, you should target adults aged 35-49 as the most active buyers of decorations, costumes, and candy for the household. As for gender differences, note that while women and men are equally likely to celebrate Halloween, how they plan to celebrate differs. GroundTruth analytics states that men are 7% more likely to throw a Halloween-themed party, and women are 13% more likely to go into decorations. 

5. Scaringly great creatives  

Last but not least, watch out for creative best practices to make sure your ads will engage the maximum number of users. Some tried-and-tested approaches include close-ups, rich autumn/Halloween themes, avoidance of visuals with people (mostly), and choosing female models if you need someone in the picture.

Got any questions on how to make your Halloween campaigns most productive?

Feel free to contact  our support for more tips and advice whenever you need it. And stay tuned for more helpful guides in our blog!

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