Fringe-hem

wool scarf

Double-layer
wool jacket

Peak sales
peak performance.
Maximize performance this holiday and
mega sales day season.
 Across Meta technologies, advertisers are using AI to
maximize holiday performance.
Meta invests in industry-leading AI to evolve its business tools, and many advertisers have already
benefited with stronger campaign performance.

During the 2022 holiday peak season, advertisers saw:

BETTER PERFORMANCE COST-EFFECTIVE INVENTORY

+20% +$3.31 +23% -22%

increase in Q4 in revenue for increase in Q4 decrease in Q4 average
conversions year- every $1 spent2 ad impressions1 price per ad1
over-year1

Highest level of conversions on Meta during the weekend of

Black Friday and Cyber Monday in Q4 last year1

And meeting the increasingly high standards of their

customers.

Best platform The top online platform The place to find

to discover deals. for holiday discovery relevant brands and
and growing products.

50% 56% 35%

found out about mega discovered brands agree that brands
sales days offers on and products on Meta and products discovered
Meta technologies.3 during the holiday season.4 on Facebook or Instagram,
during the holiday season,
are more relevant than
those discovered on
other platforms.4
Sources:
1. Meta, Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcripts
2. Meta Q1 ‘23 Earnings Call Transcripts
3. "Meta Seasonal Holidays Study" by YouGov (Meta-commissioned online study of 41,663 holiday shoppers aged 18+ across 34 markets: AE, AR, AU, BR, CA, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, ES, HK, ID, IT, FR, JP, KR, MY, MX, NL, PH,
PL, PK, SA, SG, TH, TR, TW, RU, SE, UK, US, VN, ZA). Minimum N=1500 per market, published June 2022.
4."Meta Seasonal Holidays Study" by YouGov (Meta-commissioned online study of 38,548 holiday shoppers aged 18+ across 31 markets: AE, AR, AU, BR, CA, CZ, DE, DK, ES, HK, ID, IT, FR, JP, KR, MY, MX, NL, PH, PL, PK,
SA, SG, TH, TR, TW, SE, UK, US, VN, ZA). Minimum N=1000 per market, Dec 2022

Peak season, peak performance. 2

 Automation

Lean into automation to optimize

holiday campaign performance.
The holiday season is a particularly dynamic and competitive time for marketing. Automation helps businesses
keep up with the pace of change with less budget, resources, and time. By enabling automation tools with
critical inputs, automation makes decisions based on real-time learnings and optimizes holiday campaigns
through thousands, if not millions, of iterations.

• Decision levers

BUDGET

CREATIVE

AUDIENCE

PLACEMENT

DESTINATION

Meta Advantage suite automation can make campaigns more efficient.

Advertisers can automate their entire setup or select parts of a campaign.
In this guide, we will cover a subset of the most impactful solutions within Advantage suite.

Advantage+ single step solutions

Leverage the power of AI to execute more specific campaign strategies

Budget
•
Creative
• •Shopping Placement
• • Destination
automation automation • automation automation automation
Advantage campaign Advantage+ catalog ads Advantage+ shopping Advantage+ placements Advantage destination:
budget Advantage+ creative Website, Shop*, App

*Available to checkout-enabled shops in the US.

Peak season, peak performance. 3
 AUTOMATION

End-to-end automation

Advantage+ shopping campaigns can help grow online sales

and increase performance
Targeting Optimization
Advantage+ shopping campaigns are designed to be
used when sales are your primary objective, and you are
looking to sell to new and existing customers in as few
steps as possible.
marktgoods
Sponsored

17% 32% Shop now

improvement in cost increase in return on

per conversion1 ad spend cost1

Creative Destination

RECOMMENDATIONS
Input diverse creatives and high-performing audiences to drive holiday results.

CREATIVE AUDIENCES

Import or create as many creatives as possible Upload existing customers through custom
(minimum of 10) to automatically test creative. audiences to inform the delivery system.

Include mixed formats (static image, video and Specify percentage of budget allocated
catalog) to help improve performance. toward existing customers vs. acquiring
new customers.
Connect with a Meta Business Partner to help you
generate diversified holidays creative at scale.

Success story
UK-based fashion brand, Moda in Pelle, decided to introduce Meta
Advantage+ shopping campaigns in addition to its usual Facebook
ad strategy for a fall holiday season, achieving a 2.4x increase in
return on ad spend and 65% lower costs per acquisition when
compared to usual campaigns.

Source: 1. Meta internal study on 31 advertisers from NA, APAC, EMEA, and LATAM from July-Sept 2022. 2. Meta case study,
Jan 2023. All results are self-reported and not identically repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.

Peak season, peak performance. 4

 AUTOMATION

Creative automation

Success story
French fashion ecommerce brand, Almé, saw a 20% sales increase by adopting Meta Advantage+
shopping campaigns compared to their usual campaigns. Almé also experienced a 16% decrease in
cost per purchase by using Advantage+ shopping campaigns.

Connect products to people with

Advantage+ catalog ads
Advantage+ catalog ads use machine learning to help drive sales by automatically delivering
personalized ads to new and existing shoppers based on their behavior, interests, and intent.

Two targeting options to reach holiday shoppers:

Reach new audiences

Find people most likely to love your products.

SOLUTION

Advantage+ catalog ads for broad audiences

Reach existing audiences

Help people find more of your products they
are most likely to love.

SOLUTION

Advantage+ catalog ads for retargeting

REACH INTERESTED SHOPPERS

Performance: Improve Personalization: Connect Efficiency: Drive efficient

product sales with products to people where sales of your catalog so you
machine-learning. they spend their time. can focus on strategy.

Peak season, peak performance. 5

 AUTOMATION

Placement automation

Place your ads where your customers are with

Advantage+ placements.
Use Advantage+ placements to find the most cost-effective opportunities across Meta technologies and
placements. With the Advantage+ placements solution, you can use any existing creative across multiple
placements, including Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed, Messenger and Audience Network.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Provide holiday assets in multiple formats and dimensions to optimize creative per placement.

In order to create engaging ad experiences, placement asset customization displays the right
holiday image or video depending on where those ads appear.

Use different assets. Use different crops. Use edited videos. Use different text,
For example, you could We recommend For example, you headlines and links.
upload a product image different aspect can upload a For example, Instagram
or video to Facebook and ratios for different shorter video to fit Stories work well with
a brand image or video to placements. For the Stories video short copy.
Instagram. example, use a vertical requirements
aspect ratio for ads in (1-15 seconds).
Stories.

Audience
Network

Peak season, peak performance. 6

 Creative feroldisfashion
Sponsored

diversification
Same product, different motivation.

Shop now

Shoppers have different reasons to buy during the holidays.

A Meta study found that there are at least 11 reasons that people say influence their holiday purchase
decisions including price (87%), product quality (87%), product authenticity (82%) and familiarity with
the store or site (73%).
Today, businesses are realizing the potential effect of delivering personalized messaging
at scale. Marketers that bring diversified creative to their holiday campaigns enable AI to deliver the
right ad to the relevant person.

HOW TO DIVERSIFY Identify top motivators and Map motivators to a benefit

AT SCALE barriers for your product and call to action

“My son is always on his

headphones listening to
audio books. I want
something that he will love,
and at the right price point!”

“My sister is always active

and on-the-go. I want to
get her something that’s
durable for everyday use.”

Creatives can be BY CONCEPT BY FORMAT

differentiated by concept
and format Differentiate your creative Differentiate your
routes to speak to people’s ad formats to tap into
different motivations. different viewing behaviors.

"Meta Seasonal Holidays Study" by YouGov (Meta-commissioned online study of 38,548 holiday shoppers aged 18+ across 31 markets: AE, AR, AU, BR, CA, CZ, DE, DK, ES, HK, ID, IT, FR, JP, KR, MY, MX, NL, PH, PL, PK, SA,
SG, TH, TR, TW, SE, UK, US, VN, ZA). Minimum N=1000 per market, Dec 2022

Peak season, peak performance. 7

 CREATIVE DIVERSIFICATION

Diversify your creative by exploring

people’s relationships to your products.
Consumer needs and motivations are diverse and multifaceted, so your creative should be as well.

Incorporate creative diversity

that appeals to different
audiences.

Ensure a vibrant mix of

creative assets that addresses
your customers' many reasons
to buy your products.

Visit Meta Creative Center to

view a library of inspiration from
other businesses.

REELS RECOMMENDATIONS Reels

51%
median improvement in
Make it entertaining. Build cost per incremental conversions for
content that surprises, lower-funnel conversion events.1
delights and provokes and
emotional response.

Success story
Make it digestible. Create
Reels that are easy to To boost sales and convert new customers
understand, immediate and before, during and after the Singles' Day mega
clear. Build for mobile. sales day on 11.11, beauty brand Jealousness ran
a multi-phase campaign utilizing video ads in
collaboration with creators. They achieved a
Make it relatable. Keep it remarkable 10.8% lift in purchase conversion
unpolished, imperfect and and notable 4.5-point lift in purchase intent.2
human to drive authenticity
and relatability.

Source: 1. Meta-analysis of conversion lift tests with 11 global advertisers across 9 verticals, conducted in November 2022. These results are inclusive of both Instagram and Facebook Reels. We define lower funnel
conversion events as those that happen at the end of the marketing funnel, such as purchasing an item or signing up for a service. 2. Meta case study, Jun 2022. All results are self-reported and not identically
repeatable. Generally expected individual results will differ.

Peak season, peak performance. 8

 ACCOUNT SIMPLIFICATION

Simplify your account structure to reach

potential customers faster
This enables Meta AI to learn quickly and deliver more efficient results.

19%
What is the learning phase and how lower CPA for ad sets that
is it impacted by account structure? successfully exited the learning
phase
When a campaign starts running, each ad goes
through an initial learning phase.
Learning
phase
Faster learning helps maximize marketing budget. Optimized

CONVERSION RATE
delivery
This is especially important during holidays when

EXPECTED
campaigns are typically shorter.

Simplifying your account structure helps AI

systems get the learnings you need faster.

NUMBER OF CONVERSIONS

RECOMMENDED STRUCTURE
Single campaign and ad set targeting all customer
RECOMMENDATIONS segments

Limit the number of ad sets you create. When you set

up ad sets don’t create more than needed in order to
maximize efficiency.
Campaign Ad set
Scale your sales by simplifying ad sets. Combine
campaigns to acquire new paying customers as well
Ad
as getting repeat purchases or additional sales from
existing customers into one streamlined campaign.

For businesses with few creatives, lower

conversions (<50), or niche targeting needs, it is Success story
recommended to test and learn before scaling
campaign.
The Red Wagon, an online children’s
boutique ran a multi-cell A/B test
Optimize for events with sufficient comparing Facebook ad targeting strategies
volume (50 conversions/week). and saw 77% more purchases when it used
a mix of core and high-intent targeting
Group together significant edits before peak sales strategies, compared to using core targeting
season to avoid sending an ad set back into the
learning phase. strategies alone.

Source: "Analysis excludes smaller tail-end advertisers who are not eligible to see spend in learning details, and uses only purchase optimized activity from October 2022"

Peak season, peak performance. 9

 Data quality

Strengthening data quality can help your business reach

people across their unique shopping journey.
The way people find and buy products is continuously evolving, and 73% of customers expect brands to
understand their unique needs and expectations.
Holiday consumers shop seamlessly across various channels from physical stores to mobile apps and social
media, creating unique and diverse purchasing journeys. This behavior becomes even more diverse during the
holidays when individuals are buying gifts or are on a specific timeline.

Source: Salesforce, State of the Connected Customer, 2022.

Peak season, peak performance. 10

 DATA QUALITY

Conversions API helps businesses better

understand and connect with holiday shoppers.
A direct connection between your marketing data and Meta across all your channels.

13%
cost per result improvement1

Conversions API optimizes performance by

creating a direct connection between your
cross-channel marketing data and Meta.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Event match quality helps you track how likely it
Maximize data quality to find
is that your events match a Meta account,
relevant holiday shoppers.
increasing conversions and improving
acquisition costs.

Combine Conversions API with

the Meta Pixel to enhance the
information available to optimize
your ad.

Ensure information sent from

your server is matching to Meta
accounts by maintaining an
event match quality of "good" or
"great."

Confirm you’re not counting

events from multiple data
sources more than once.
Success story
Ensure data freshness by
Karla and Co. This Latina-owned women’s minimizing the time between
fashion brand saw a 1.5x increase in return when the event occurred and
on ad spend by bundling the Conversions when it is sent via the
API and Advantage+ shopping campaigns. Conversions API.

Source: 1. Based on 28 global A/B experiments of direct, partner or Conversions API Gateway integrations between May to August 2022. 2. Meta case study, Nov 2022.

Peak season, peak performance. 11

 Measurement

Understanding the true impact of your marketing helps

inform holiday campaign strategies.
Measurement can help businesses like yours prepare for holiday campaigns, as it allows you to understand
the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve their strategies.

The right measurement approach helps answer these questions and more:

Which tactics can What approach How do I allocate

maximize my holiday works best for my holiday resources
ads’ performance? business? effectively?

Test and learn:

A/B testing can provide a data-driven approach to identify what
elements drive the best performance to optimize the performance of
campaigns.
Choose one element to test, while keeping the others constant to get
clear and actionable insights.

Source: Momentive: 4 strategies to drive highly-effective marketing in 2023.

Peak season, peak performance. 12

 MESSAGING

Build relationships and connection with messaging.

Start more conversations with ads that let people chat directly with your business in
Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp.

Chat with customers

Create ads that click to Messenger and send people
that click on your ads directly into conversations with
your business.
• Invite customers to chat with action buttons.
• Provide automated customer support.
• Close sales with customers one-on-one.

78% 66%
of consumers say of consumers say they are
messaging is their preferred more likely to purchase from
way of communicating with a company they can contact
a business1 via messaging.1

Generate high quality leads

using Instant Forms
Instant Forms are one of the most direct ways to find new
customers for your business. Potential customers can
easily express interest in your business with just a few
simple taps.

• Optimized for mobile: Instant forms load quickly and

auto-populate with customer contact information
previously shared with Meta.

• Form fields are editable and customizable. Learn how to

build effective Instant Forms here.

Source: Business Messaging Usage Research by Kantar. (Meta commissioned online study of 5,504 online adults in BR, MX,
ID, TH, VN, UK, DE, ES, DR, IN, US), April 2022

Peak season, peak performance. 13

 HOLIDAY AND MEGA SALE DAYS PLANNER | 2023

Maximize performance during peak sales moments.

4–8 WEEKS BEFORE THE MOMENT 1–4 WEEKS BEFORE THE MOMENT AFTER THE MOMENT

Reach shoppers early to build Take advantage of peak purchase

awareness and create demand for activity during the moment until
your shopping moment. shipping cutoff date.

Build holiday campaign foundations

and use measurement tools to test After the shipping cutoff date,
and learn which strategies work best. competition declines and creates an
opportunity for retailers and businesses
who do not need to meet a Christmas
delivery.

Stay top of mind. CPMs are

significantly lower than the Q4
average after Christmas and into the
new year. Coupled with a continued
demand to shop, businesses have an
opportunity to continue driving sales
efficiently.

Peak season, peak performance. 14

 HOLIDAY AND MEGA SALE DAYS PLANNER | 2023

Suggested holiday and mega sales day campaign plan.

FOUNDATIONS 4–8 WEEKS BEFORE THE MOMENT 1–4 WEEKS BEFORE THE MOMENT AFTER THE MOMENT

Set up Conversions API

to connect your server
with Meta ads delivery
system.

Data
Maintain an event
match quality of
“good” or “great.”

Consider a
Build seasonal creative refresh
creative that to speak
is diversified to “after the
across concepts moment”
Creative and formats. shopping
motivations.
Start
planning
post-season
campaigns
to reach
lapsed or Reach valuable
Minimize
Adopt the simplest late audiences with
changes to
account structure shoppers. less setup time
avoid
possible. and greater
resetting the
learning efficiency
phase. with Advantage+
Consider shopping
optimizing for
Align bid strategy campaigns.
higher funnel Market to lapsed
with campaign goals metrics (add to or late shoppers
around volume, cost cart, link clicks, with Advantage+
or ROI. Help match your
landing page shopping
products to people
Media view) to increase campaigns and
with Advantage+
reach. Advantage+
catalog ads.
catalog ads.
Automate across
budget, audience, Drive people in
creative and store for last-
placements. minute purchases
after shipping
cutoff dates with
custom audiences.

Create a learning Apply learnings

plan to identify, test Understand campaign performance
from
Measurement and answer key with custom and benchmark
holiday/mega sale
business questions. reports.
days campaigns.

Peak season, peak performance. 15