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chevron-downWith every year that passes, mobile plays an increasingly critical role in all of our lives. And no one is paying more attention to these trends right now than marketers. While people are getting beach ready, many marketers are quietly embarking on their final blitz for the holidays—researching shopping trends and deciding on strategies that will help them win during the most important time of the year for their business.
To help these marketers as they finalize their strategies, we're sharing new trends and tools to help guide holiday planning.
New research out today by Facebook IQ shows that the reliance on mobile to discover new products will deepen this holiday season. We predict that mobile will serve as a 24-hour personal shopper as people grab their devices in spare moments to research and purchase gifts. Last year, we saw more than half of all online conversions on Facebook come from mobile compared to desktop. And these mobile shoppers aren't looking to their devices during work hours—for every single weekend, and in every single region included in our look the 2016 holiday season, the share of mobile conversions rose during weekend hours.1
This shopping behavior is giving marketers new opportunities to understand and influence customers on mobile. To grow sales this holiday season, businesses need to reach people earlier in their purchase journey rather than waiting for them to search for you.
We know this to be particularly true for mobile-first shoppers in the US, who are 1.72x and 2.51x more likely to get inspiration for gift or shopping ideas on Facebook and Instagram, respectively. 2 With this in mind, businesses should explore ways for their products to find people rather than just wait for people to find their products.
Captivate shoppers with more creative dynamic ads
We predict that video will play a bigger role in product discovery for the coming holiday season. In fact, 30% of mobile shoppers surveyed said they prefer to discover new products through video. 3 Dynamic ads launched over two years ago and is a powerful way for businesses to promote products from their product catalog across devices. Updates we've made to dynamic ads will allow businesses to showcase their products in more creative and immersive ways.
First, we're introducing video for dynamic ads. Businesses can now upload product-level videos to showcase in their dynamic ads rather than only static images. Videos can be uploaded via the Facebook API or through the asset manager. Businesses like Made.com are already using the power of video to captivate shoppers.
With new product launches every week, dynamic ads are an essential part our Facebook and Instagram strategy. Combining the creative impact of video with the personalized aspect of dynamic ads will allow us to improve user experience with MADE
—Annabel Kilner, Commercial Director, MADE.com
Next, we're introducing overlays for dynamic ads to make them more captivating and informative.
These overlays offer an option to include price, a percentage off as calculated from differences between sale and price, or the sale price and regular price strikethrough. They come in an array of shapes (circle, triangle, rectangle), fonts, text, background color, and placements — and are customizable even at the ad level. Businesses can create overlays for dynamic ads in Business Manager or the API. All of these updates to dynamic ads will be rolling out over the next couple months.
Inspire the entire household to buy gifts
Mobile shoppers aren't just younger generations anymore. This holiday season, expect to see all members of the household embrace a mobile-first shopping frame of mind. In fact, parents made up over 50% of mobile-first shoppers last year, and we expect this trend to grow. 4 That's why we're introducing new solutions to reach members of a household that may be in the market to buy gifts and make it easier for marketers to compare campaign performance across channels.
First, marketers can create a new household audience that includes additional people who live in the same household of those in their original audience. This feature enables marketers to deliver relevant marketing to family members in the same household, who can influence purchase decisions of products and services. Now a marketer can not only show ads to their target audience, but inspire members of their audience's household to purchase.
Next, we've heard that brands want more data on the number of households their campaigns reach, beyond the people-based reporting we currently offer. Today we're also introducing a new suite of household measurement insights in Ads Reporting that show how Facebook campaigns drive results across various household members. These metrics provide information on how many households are reached by advertising and at what frequency. They will also allow businesses to better attribute conversions that occur within a household and understand how Facebook ads may impact the conversion behavior of various household members, not just the person seeing the ad.
We've carefully designed these products to protect privacy. People can opt out of household marketing altogether by removing themselves from the “member of a family-based household” category in Ads Preferences.
Brands like Airbnb and Netflix are excited by the potential to leverage household marketing on Facebook.
"Decisions to make large purchases for a household are often made by multiple members of that household. In travel especially, a family will together decide where to go so we are often more interested in the household than the individual. Facebook's household measurement allows us to more cleanly run lift tests to understand this group behavior. And their household audience enables us to not only increase reach to new potential travelers, but also improve the efficiency of our spend as we can better map conversions. We are very much looking forward to this step change in targeted advertising."
—Alok Gupta, Data Science Manager, Airbnb
“This product is a step forward for advertisers that need to better understand the attribution of a digital household product. We're looking forward to exploring the ways we can leverage this data set to improve our advertising.”
—Kyle Sherin, Senior Manager, Global Programmatic Channel Development, Netflix
The household marketing products are now available in the U.S., with planned expansion to other regions in the next year.
Our goal is to continue supporting businesses with tools and tips throughout the year. We look forward to helping you maximize what is sure to be the most mobile holiday season yet. Happy planning!
