For brands, Presidents’ Day isn’t just about celebrating great American leaders and heads of state. It’s also about celebrating one of America’s greatest pastimes: shopping. And, more specifically, reaching customers with great deals for the holiday.
This past Presidents’ Day — February 20, 2023 — publishers and retailers pulled out all the stops to help shoppers find the best sales for their wallets. And, here at Taboola, we dug into the data to see which Presidents’ Day content and campaigns drove the most engagement among our audiences.
What did we find?
Creative trends, tips, and strategies to use for your next big American holiday campaign — be it Memorial Day, Labor Day, or even Presidents’ Day 2024.
Let’s take a look.
When to Run Campaigns
First, we pulled readership data from our U.S. publisher network on April 19 to see how engagement fared around the term “presidents day.” As this chart shows, pageviews started to pick up on February 13, about one week before Presidents’ Day. And engagement quickly tapered off after the holiday ended.
Top Stories + Readership Trends
Next, we pulled some of the top stories driving clicks on the Skimlinks network from February 13-28.
Among top articles with “presidents-day” in their URL, we noticed these key readership trends:
- Articles about specific brands. While some publishers created posts about general Presidents’ Day sales, many launched pieces dedicated to specific brands like REI, Lululemon, and Saatva.
- It’s all about the numbers. Publishers weren’t shy about advertising Presidents’ Day sales with “20% Off” or “60% Off” in their headlines, hooking readers in.
- Home goods and fashion reigned supreme. There was a clear emphasis on home items like mattresses, rugs, and kitchenware, along with apparel like athletic clothes, running shoes, and pajamas.
This also lines up with Skimlinks’ findings that home was the number-one Presidents’ Day purchase category in terms of value. In fact, consumer spending in the ome category increased 24.4% year-over-year in 2022 and 117% in 2021.
Creative Best Practices
As for creative best practices, we dug into ad image performance among U.S. audiences for the week of February 19.
According to Taboola Trends, ad visuals with color, people, photos, close-up shots, and no text increased clickthrough rates (CTRs) for Presidents’ Day campaigns:
Advertisers can also use the Taboola Title Aalyzer to see which headline options are predicted to drive the highest CTR. Among these Presidents’ Day headlines, for example, we can clearly see that “Shop Home Goods With These Top Presidents’ Day Sales” is primed to generate the most engagement:
Putting these insights together, here’s an example of what a Presidents’ Day campaign might look like for an athletic wear brand:
Targeting Best Practices
Once your creative assets are ready to go, you can use these targeting best practices to reach the right audiences with your Presidents’ Day campaigns:
- Automate your spend with SmartBid. Taboola’s automated bidding tool, SmartBid, adjusts your bids in real time to help increase conversions and meet your budget goals. With SmartBid, you can let your campaigns run and have peace of mind knowing that your costs will be predictable and reliable.
- Increase awareness with High Impact Placements. Make sure your ads are seen in brand-safe, highly impactful placements across premium publisher sites. Taboola uses data based on 1 trillion recommendations, 22 billion monthly pageviews, and 516 million daily active users to pinpoint the right placements for your campaigns.
- Grab readers’ attention with Motion Ads. Find that sweet spot between static images and videos with Motion Ads — GIF-like creative assets that play on a short loop. Motion Ads are designed to help advertisers meet their click and conversion goals while lowering their cost per action (CPA).
The People Have Spoken: Build Presidents’ Day Campaigns Your Audience Will Vote For
…or, you know, click for. With these data-backed insights to guide your strategies, you can be well prepared to tap into Presidents’ Day trends and generate performance. Also, beyond just this February holiday, you can use these findings to build more engaging ads for related holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day — and reach shoppers with campaigns that inspire them to spend.