Now, on to this week's data:
The first week of April comes with red arrow showers. Conversion rates and CACs take a steep shift as budget consolidates to Meta across advertisers. This is the first time in our report that average budget distributions are above 70% on Meta. Regardless of the bugs that the Meta ad platform is experiencing, your Average Joe Marketer is still reliant on it, and even more so as customer acquisition becomes more challenging through the year.
Looking forward and strategizing: there are four weeks till Mother's Day, six weeks till Memorial Day, nine weeks until Father's Day, and 12 weeks until Amazon Prime Day. If you were to run promotional offers during every single one of those periods, that's still two to four weeks between each where you can run aggressive creative tests to find hot ads.
If new customer acquisition is the primary goal (it should be) run the tests hard, keep shooting creative, and stack up a massive bank of specific learnings now. The summer is gonna be dead, then in the fall political ads are going to clog up the feed and piss everybody off. GET THE LEARNINGS NOW!
Then you can spend the summer (slow buying times, usually) doing the dirty work of cleaning up the demand capture flows. You'll always have purchases coming through, so demand capture is easier to test in slow times compared to demand generation. Fix your Google funnels, email drips, landing pages, etc. later this year.
Now's the time to gather awareness learnings across all your channels. Weather's improving, summer is coming, work is peaking, wallets are filling up. Don't let these red arrows confuse you or your clients - this is the best time to build up a defensible base of "we know that these ads work."
Want more? I cover the rest in the Q1 Benchmarks Report. Download it here.