On Easter, families gather to celebrate by spending time together and eating a delicious meal. Tradition also includes a visit from the Easter Bunny, who hides candy and small toys for young ones to collect in their Easter baskets.
Happiness around the holidays is widespread—one study from Páez, Bilbao, Bobowik, Campos, & Basabe looked into the determinants of happiness during the holidays and found that spending time with family was one of the main contributors.
So, how does this happiness translate to online behavior? We took a look at recent data from Taboola Trends, which provides up-to-date image and keyword trends on a weekly basis based on 75 million clicks and 50 billion impressions.
It turns out that brands can expect more clicks on the open web this Easter—if they follow a few best practices.
Brands can expect more clicks this Easter.
This Easter, content campaigns that include images of people can expect to see a 27% increase in click-through-rate (CTR) as opposed to images without people across the globe.
As Easter approaches, we saw the CTR for creatives that included images of people rise, with a substantial increase in clicks throughout February.
Food, colors and people-free images see more clicks when brands use the word ‘bananas.’
It’s no accident that our subconscious leans toward food during the holidays—specifically, we’re seeing a lot of clicks on the word ‘bananas.’ We mean a lot.
For food brands, there are a couple of best practices to keep in mind this Easter:
- The keyword ‘bananas’ receives a 200% higher CTR this time of year—and stay away from the word ‘olives,’ whose CTR decreases by 50%.
- Keep your images colorful for a 100% increase in CTR, and only use images with animals if you want to see that CTR decrease by the same amount.
- People and food don’t do well together, as CTR decreases by 43%, but if you need to use people in your imagery, keep them at a distance for a 12% increase in CTR.
- Finally, we’re also seeing illustrative images doing well with an 81% increase in CTR, which is pretty rare on our network.
Who Should Use Images of Food: US, UK or German Advertisers?
Food brands aren’t the only advertisers who are using food in their images. We’re seeing advertisers from all different verticals take advantage of Easter’s traditional candy hunts too. We took a look at the difference between Germany, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US) to see if these delicious images are hurting or helping CTRs.
Globally, the data doesn’t show that big of a difference between creatives with images of food versus those with images without food, but this changes when you break it down by country:
- The UK sees a 14% increase in CTR for images with food.
- In the US sees a 38% decrease in CTR for images with food.
- Germany sees a huge increase for images with food; 186%!
It could be that the US and the UK focus less on the food during Easter, while in Germany we might be witnessing the opposite trend. Either way, serious cultural differences are found here!
We’re constantly exploring shifts in behavior with Taboola Trends to help advertisers deliver data-driven campaigns that are primed for success, check out the site.