What’s the best way to kick off 2025 for your brand? Diving into your 2024 holiday advertising data and looking for helpful insights for the new year.
The holiday shopping season can be make or break for many brands. Because of this, and understandably so, many marketers spend Cyber Week through the holidays in the day-to-day trenches stressing about the final push of the year and hitting revenue goals.
After the holidays, attention naturally shifts to initiatives for the next year. However, many marketing teams miss a huge opportunity by not performing a deep dive into the plethora of holiday advertising data that they just collected from one of their busiest selling seasons of the year.
Holiday data isn’t only useful for developing holiday strategies. It can uncover untapped growth opportunities for your brand regardless of the season. This is why our teams at ROI Revolution insist on aggregating Holiday data and using it to inspire strategy for the new year.
We are going to share some of our combined client 2024 Holiday data here and what those insights might suggest should be top of mind for 2025.
2024 Cyber Week Recap
During Cyber week, our clients saw HUGE successes with paid social advertising. Overall investment was up YoY for this channel. For those that invested more on social, they were rewarded with lower CPCs, better clickthrough rates, and most importantly, more revenue at a better ROAS. CPCs were down 15% this year from last year on Meta for our clients across the board which made exposure on this channel incredibly efficient compared to years past.
Where the cost of advertising on Meta was down during Cyber Week, we saw costs increase significantly on Google. CPCs were up 18% YoY. Our brands experienced the highest CPCs on Cyber Monday and the highest percentage increase in cost YoY on Black Friday.
Black Friday was the biggest selling day for the brands that work with us, driving 5% more revenue than we saw come in on Cyber Monday.
On-site conversion rates were up YoY. The most growth happened on the off-peak days of Thanksgiving Day, Saturday and Sunday during Cyber week.
Average order value did not increase or decrease from last year for most of our clients.
2024 Holiday Advertising Recap
December was an incredibly strong month for clients YoY, even outside of the major shopping days during Cyber Week. Traffic overall was up slightly, but we saw a significant increase in conversion rates across the board.
CPCs for Meta and Google were the lowest of the quarter during the last two weeks of December. Conversion rates for the week of December 16 – 22 were higher than all of November and December.
We also saw that event-scoped transactions and revenue were down for organic search across the board during the 2024 holiday shopping season. What is curious is that session-scoped revenue was up YoY. It’s possible that Google’s data-driven attribution model for event-scoped conversions is undervaluing organic touchpoints. This is something to continue to monitor as you assess your brand’s digital strategy heading into the new year.
What do these 2024 holiday advertising insights mean for your brand going into 2025?
If you are not dissecting your holiday data to inform your strategies for 2025, you are missing out. We will share our main takeaways below, but if you want a more custom look at your data, schedule a call with our team.
The benefits of diversifying when and where you spend your ad dollars
Heading into 2025, the holiday performance trends show the relative danger of being a business that is all-in on paid search. It’s not that paid search was unprofitable for our clients. It wasn’t. Many clients did very well on the channel. But at what price point? And what growth did they miss out on by solely investing in this channel where costs were higher than they have ever been?
Incrementality was much stronger on Meta. If your brand is not building an all-encompassing digital strategy that includes a thoughtful investment in social advertising and channels other than paid search, you could be missing out on huge revenue opportunities.
Similar to diversifying where you spend your ad dollars, another important area to diversify is when you are spending. Historically many brands cap out their spend during Cyber Week and choose to greatly taper off spend the remaining weeks of December.
As we mentioned above, CPCs were the lowest of the quarter during the last two weeks of December and conversion rates were the highest from December 16th through December 22nd. Don’t cap yourselves on budget before the holiday, and if your business offers rush shipping options, it’s much cheaper to take advantage of last-minute shoppers.
Insights from this trend should carry into your 2025 strategies not only for the holidays but across the board. Shoppers take longer than ever to make purchase decisions and consumers are conditioned to receive orders quickly because of the growth of Amazon and other big box next day delivery options. The lesson here is to pace your budget accordingly, advertise to shoppers throughout each season during the year and capitalize during weeks where CPCs are low.
What’s next for your brand in 2025?
Overall our clients had a great 2024 holiday shopping season and we are already incorporating the insights and trends from that success into their 2025 advertising strategies.
Need help dissecting your holiday data or not sure what your holiday performance is telling you about what will work for your brand in 2025? Schedule a call with our team. We’ll show you exactly what partnering with our team of digital experts can mean for your brand’s bottom line.
