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Dear PPC Members (RE: Q4 DOWNSLIDE)
As someone who has been doing this for well more than a decade with over 2 million ad spend on FB and Google… let me share a story as old as time itself.
Every year — *without fail* — around late October conversions start to shit the bed. This gets weirder in late November, and then just really pisses us all off in December.
The worst part?
You think that, “Ok, January is going to come out the gate hard…” and it *doesn’t*.
Usually recovery is late January to early February. That typically depends on the market, and if things like CES are eating up ad spend, which maybe they won’t this year but I’m not holding my breath.
Why does this happen?
Because so many fucking companies save up for a huge end of the year ad spend. They’re trying to take advantage of MULTIPLE holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas) plus they’re taking advantage of the two largest sales of the year (Black Friday and Cyber Monday)… and that’s all within a 3 month period.
It’s always hectic, CPM’s always rise and fighting for eyeballs gets harder.
And it always passes, and the hustlers always figure out a way to squeeze juice out of the lemon during this time (going after weird interests, testing other platforms, pushing more towards retargeting, etc).
Just saw a bunch of posts here with people freaking out and wanted to drop a little bit of hope.
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7 Replies
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November 2020 is not your typical “late October decline” for multiple reasons
1. The effect of the new adwords rules for zip code targeting
2. New rules in Adwords regarding credit targeting
3. A disputed elected
4. Media about second wave of covid
5. Stimulus uncertainty
6. Black Friday and cyber Monday
7. Unusually high unemploymentThis is for all intents and purposes the “worst case scenario”.
Ad spend does not translate to proper analysis. Plenty of companies waste ungodly amounts of money and get nothing out of it. Ebay experiment on buying its own name being a prime example.
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Agree 100%. FB and GGL have seasonal demand. That’s it. Knowing that ahead of time makes me relax. And to explain the late January recovery: lot of fitness/diet/née year resolution protected companies market hard after the new year. New Year, New You!
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I dont ever remember $100cpm’s on FB for interests that a month or so ago were $10 as being typical… I guess the good news is there’s a TON of people who just wont be able to find any profit there, which will lower costs in the long run as they quit/go out of business. It just doesn’t make sense for me to keep my ads running on fb when I’m paying like 5-10x as much. An ad with an ROA that would have been 12~ a month ago would now be unprofitable/break-even for me if they only buy a single item, which is mindblowing to me (as in, I dont see how anyone can make money off that)
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It’s an election year with added unemployment due to covid.
This year will just be an outlier in future data.
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It really depends on your market. A lot of my clients are actually getting pretty solid sales since early December. BF and CM were a little slow vs last year though. One of my clients had horrible results October and November and is doing really well right now.
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Had to stop my Ads for the first time in years, I lost 5k in 10 days of December
I don’t know what to do, Ads are suddenly not converting at all (ROAS 0.50) any clues? :/
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I’ve recently come to the realization this is true. I had a slightly difficult Q4 in 2019, and then I started off 2020 and sure enough, things picked up the end of January. My plan was to prep for Q4 in 2020 when I really should have taken better advantage of the lower competition in Q1-Q3. I certainly put far too much stock in Q4 and things declined steadily after September. BFCM this year was the first time I’ve ever not made a profitable ROAS in the last 4 years.
That said, It just encourages me to take better advantage of the rest of the year when, you know, CPM’s are not like 3x higher because of the insane competition. I’d never hit a CPM over $25 in the last 3 years with my business but it has been solidly that high in the last 3 months.
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