With 2021 in our rear-view mirrors, 2022 has arrived, and new opportunities to pursue new goals with it. As UK readers make their health and wellness resolutions for the upcoming year, marketers in these industries need to step up their game to stand out from the competition.

Get a competitive edge by reviewing last year’s Taboola and Skimlinks health and fitness New Year’s resolutions trends, and studying our predictions for how this year’s resolutions will shape up.

Overall, in the UK, posts with the keyword phrase “January Sales” had a significant boost in performance, with traffic increases on the Skimlinks network of up to 132% over 2020. Although these appeared to be primarily general roundup-style posts, there were a few that could fall into the New Year’s Resolution category, such as cycling or gardening roundups.

During the first nine days of 2021, product-led pieces on Skimlinks’ publisher partners proved popular with readers, specifically those about exercise equipment. These included posts about sales on exercise bikes, treadmills, cross-trainers and rowing machines, likely related to the health and fitness resolutions people were making.

Healthy food posts and articles on the Skimlinks network about meal kits, healthy food deliveries, recipe boxes were popular, likely in response to the ever-popular “eat healthier” resolution. The keyword “Veganuary” was a growth topic last year, with a 15% increase in traffic year-over-year. Popular products include vegan protein powders, recipe boxes, and beauty options.

In the quest to become healthier, “vitamin” content on the Skimlinks network grew a whopping 232% year-over-year in 2021, with content about Vitamin C serums, Vitamin D supplements, and vitamin subscription services leading the way.

The simple keyword “Fitness” enjoyed a 188% surge in UK Skimlinks traffic over 2020 as people looked for ways to get fit. Other popular UK products included:

  • Massage guns
  • Exercise equipment
  • Protein shakes
  • Yoga gear
  • Posture correctors

Although a smaller segment of this vertical, a New Year’s Resolution to drink less alcohol might be behind the 251% year-over-year traffic boost in the UK for the keyword phrase “Dry January.”

It’s a new year, yet health and fitness resolutions in 2022 look similar to 2021. This is likely due to the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to recent figures from Finder.com, 54% of people in the United Kingdom plan to make New Year’s resolutions in 2022, with 25% of people making resolutions focused on their health. Health-related resolutions are the most popular.

However, the percentage of Brits making health-related resolutions varies according to age, with 31% of Generation Z, 32% of Millennials, and 26% of Generation X saying they will make health-related resolutions in 2022.

Additionally, Finder.com reports that 28% of females will make health-related resolutions compared to 22% of males.

Along with the stats on who is making health and fitness resolutions and what kind of resolutions they’re making, marketers should consider the trends in news content on these topics.

We tapped into Taboola’s UK publisher network to get a look at what people have been searching for recently when it comes to health and fitness.

Here’s what we found as of January 3rd, 2022.

The keyword ‘Health’ had over 31 million pageviews, with the last 45 days seeing a massive spike of 106%!

Food delivery and veganism are hot topics when it comes to food and wellness.

In the past 90 days, news stories with the key words ‘food delivery’ (59,280 page views) ‘vegan’ (488,730 pageviews), and ‘Veganuary’, (236,180 page views) have been grabbing people’s attention.

Publishers Doing it Right

We also took a look around the web to find UK news publications who are expertly capitalizing on these trends to capture readers’ interest.

To start, Marie Claire encourages fitness resolutions and exercise with a fun showcase of the 14 best yoga mats for 2022. Regarding foods for healthy weight loss and better gut health, Women’s Fitness UK lists 15 helpful foods – perfect for adding to a January shopping list to help stick to a healthy eating resolution. And for those readers who aren’t yet completely sold on the health aspects of veganism, BBC published an article answering the question of how healthy are vegan ready meals?

General Best Practices for Audience Targeting

Regardless of your sector, there are a few best practices to help get your brand’s content in front of the right audience.

Automate with SmartBid

Have you tried SmartBid?

The SmartBid algorithm automatically optimizes your ad bids to yield the most impressions and conversions. In essence, the deep learning technology takes historical and real-time information to increase or decrease your bids as needed for you to make the most of your budget and take full advantage of potential outcomes.

Consider High Impact Placements

By distributing your advertising across premium publisher websites and apps, you could increase brand recognition by launching ad campaigns through what are known as high-impact placements.

High-impact locations may assist you in reaching audiences on the homepage, in the middle of an article, in the Taboola Feed, or even across mobile platforms. High-impact placements allow you to decide where and how your advertisements get presented.

Consider Motion Ads

Taboola’s sponsored content locations can include short video assets known as Motion Ads.

Motion Ads are a fantastic way to complement your existing creative strategy while increasing click-through and boosting conversion rates (CVRs), resulting in lower CPA.

In addition, advertisers using Motion Ads get the opportunity to use an A/B test strategy to identify the motion ads getting the highest CPAs. For example, it’s easy to test new short videos or GIFs by adding them to existing campaigns.

Vertical-Specific Best Practices for Audience Targeting

Depending on your product category, UK advertisers can use these vertical-specific best practices, pulled on December 12, 2021, to improve engagement and help readers meet their 2022 New Year’s resolutions.

Fitness

UK fitness advertisers looking to optimize their campaigns during the busy New Year’s Resolution season in January should look to these best practices.

When making a content type selection, fitness publishers should select Text over Video and Photo to achieve higher calibrated CTR, with lower spend.

Are you looking for leads? Create your ads for Mobile over a Tablet or Desktop experience for higher calibrated CTR and a lower cost.

Health

UK health brands can capitalize on their digital advertising by selecting Video over Photo and Text for a higher calibrated CTR and lower spend.

When it comes to picking a platform, Mobile and Tablet outperform Desktop ads in the health vertical, based on the data showing a higher calibrated CTR and lower spend.

In terms of health purchases, our data indicate that Tablets perform better than Mobile and Desktop – once again, indicated by higher calibrated CTR and lower spend.

Food

Here’s the data you need to make the best choices when creating food ads during the busy New Year’s Resolution season of early 2022.

Forget the text — select Photo and Video ads over words.

Our UK data shows that when it comes to boosting brand awareness through food ads, your audience chooses Mobile over Tablet and Desktop (higher calibrated CTR, lower spend)

When it comes to finally making a food purchase, audiences prefer to do so via Tablet.

If you struggle to create engaging fitness and health ads, here’s a look at the creative trends popping up in our Taboola UK data. In a nutshell, it’s all about images and videos – but a few particular tips are emerging from the latest trends.

Here’s what we found for UK advertisers on January 3rd, 2021.

Images

Taboola Trends finds health & fitness images in an outdoor setting, without text, and without people are receiving higher CTRs.

Outdoor images are currently boosting CTR by 110%, and images without text are performing 20% better than those with text.

Videos

To boost those video completion rates, Taboola Trends video data finds UK advertisers should include colour, women, and winter scenes.

Colour videos have a 104% higher completion rate than black and white, videos with women enjoy a 100% higher completion rate than those with men, as do videos with winter scenes over summer. Also, the data suggests selecting live-action video over illustrations, as they have a 95% higher completion rates.

Choosing the right images, crafting suitable videos, and making decisions about graphics are just one part of creative best practices for optimizing ad campaigns targeting health and fitness New Year’s Resolutions. Of course, you also need a brilliant headline that grabs the reader’s attention enough to click through and find out more about your product or service.

That’s where Taboola Title Analyzer shines. This nifty tool predicts which title will generate the highest CTR.

Let’s try it out with these three sample New Year’s Resolution titles:

  • 10 Best Health and Fitness Resolutions in 2022
  • 10 Surprisingly Popular Health and Fitness Resolutions for 2022
  • Top Health and Fitness Resolutions for 2022

Using the Taboola Title Analyzer, we can see the first title that will likely return the highest CTR.

Pulling together the findings and creative best practices from each area, you could design something like this for a health and fitness campaign.

Or you could create something along these lines for your food and wellness advertising promotions.

Inspiring Case Studies

Need some ideas to get started? Here are a couple of brands in the health and fitness and food delivery service areas following the latest creative best practices to design ads that deliver.

VAHA Smart Fitness Mirrors

Vaha Smart Fitness Mirrors were ready to discover new audiences at scale, outside of the search and social media avenues. So the brand, offering a smart fitness mirror that helps people create a routine that “makes them feel good,” worked with Taboola to implement 30-day-free-trial sponsored content campaigns. They could then retarget the Taboola audiences on social media.

The results? A CPC rate 112% lower than search and social media channels, twice the conversion rate with Attentive Audiences, and a 338% increase in engaged site visits since January 2021.

Plated

Meal kit company Plated was ready to grow its customer base and innovate beyond using typical digital acquisition methods such as Facebook and Google.

By tapping into the resources offered through Taboola, the healthy meal kit subscription company could distribute content-based advertising across premium digital publisher sites, reaching audiences already interested in this type of messaging and open to learning more.

Through Taboola’s powerful technology, the team at Plated A/B tested various creative options and configurations to create an ad campaign focused on clicks and conversions. With repeated analysis and tweaking of content configuration, Plated decreased their acquisition cost by 75%, generated 1 billion impressions, and increased their sign up rate by 12%

Embrace Data in 2022

Although 2021 may have challenged many people and businesses worldwide, 2022 offers online brands a new chance to harness the power of high-quality data to create highly targeted ad campaigns. So whether you’re looking to increase brand awareness, lower your CPC, increase your CTR, or scale up your current campaigns, data-driven digital advertising is your answer in 2022.

Get inspiration and assistance to optimize your health and fitness, food and wellness campaigns to reach the audiences eager to meet their 2022 New Year’s Resolutions to get fit, healthy and well.

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