Meta's Perfect Gift for Advertisers Before The Holiday Season

Your weekly dose of best practices for building a successful DTC brand.

October 25, 2023

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋

We'll send you weekly emails, every Wednesday, trying our best to deliver great value to your inbox.

In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 Meta's Perfect Gift for Advertisers Before The Holiday Season

💠 Americans say they’re holding firm on holiday shopping – the season starts now

💠 From Startup to Shark Tank in Only 1 Year

This is perfect timing!

Meta has recently added a new time-based budget scheduling option.

Which enables advertisers to set a higher budget for a campaign within a specific period.

Here's how it works:

👉 Navigate to an ad set and turn this feature on (or to the ad campaign level for Advantage+ campaigns)

👉 Set the start and end dates, and choose a budget increase either by value amount or percentage

👉 You can add up to 50 time periods with a specific budget increase

Is this something new?

Well, yes and no.

This is a new feature, but increasing budgets for specific time periods isn't.

It's something that could be done before either manually or through rules.

That being said, automated beats manual.

And let's be honest...who likes rules anyway?

They tend to be very confusing and many times lead to undesired issues.

Now, are there any side effects from using this feature?

As they say: "With great powers, comes great responsibility".

In this case, Meta has never been a fan of changing the ad campaign budgets pretty often.

And with features like this, it gets easier to forget the impact these changes may have on performance.

So, I'd say you should use it, but not abuse it, as we're not sure how these changes in the budget may impact performance.

What do you think?

According to Shopify, 41% of holiday shoppers plan to start buying in October (RIGHT.NOW.) 😱

39% in November, and 20% in December.

How much are they willing to spend?

Nearly three in four holiday shoppers (74%) plan to spend about the same or more on holiday gifts this year compared to last year
41% plan to start shopping by the end of October
Gen Z is feeling the most generous: 37% plan to spend more than last year

Shoppers want to support small businesses:

Shopping small is still big, driving holiday purchase decisions this season.

Nearly one in four (23%) shoppers rank shopping with small and local businesses as the top reason they choose one retailer over another.

These businesses can take advantage of this by creating specific promotions for Small Business Saturday, which this year falls on November 25.