There are two trends in this Halloween holiday for search advertising. Again, retailers who specialize in halloween cuisine have drawn the interest of shoppers, but few retailers have done well with paid search advertising and product listing ads. Retailers seem to be better than one.
Kantar Media Group AdGooroo analyzed text ads and product listing ads for 823 Halloween-related keywords between September 1 and October 15, including “Halloween Costumes,” “Halloween Decorations,” “Costumes” And “Halloween Shop.” The results of this U.S. study are limited to research on 823 keyword Google desktop text ads and product listing campaigns.
For the past month and a half, more than half of advertisers in U.S. Google text ads are specialty retailers, who are typically active during Halloween, and their paid search rankings have dropped during the rest of the year.
According to Jim Leichenko, marketing director at AdGooroo, specialty apparel retailers dominate search engines this season, peaking in August and ending in October, while rest are relatively calm.
Wholesale Halloween Costumes, a specialist retailer in Minnesota, accounts for 16% of all text ad clicks, while Amazon ranks second with a CTR of 13.6%. Boutique Halloween ranks third with 13.2% CTR.
Online Shop Spirit Halloween is owned by Spencer’s gift, which, according to AdGooroo, runs 1,200 seasonal retail stores across 50 U.S. states and 9 Canadian provinces.
Party City hits 6.8%, Wholesale Halloween Costumes hits 6.4%, top five.
Traditional brands – ceramic barn children, high-volume and Grandin Road – accounted for 2%, 1.7% and 1.6% respectively of the click share. Those generated less than 1% in the “other” category.
Few companies do a good job of text and PLA. Pottery Barn Kids, Chasing Fireflies and Cheap Halloween Costumes are among the top advertisers with ads and text ads.
Wizard Halloween with 10% clickthrough rate, 9.3% for party cities, and 8.2% for Halloween Costumes Outlet, making it the highest-rated advertiser for the top five product and text ads.
Interestingly, Halloween Costumes Outlet and Amazon ranked number one and number two in text ads advertisers and number fourteenth and number twenty-eighth, respectively, as product listing ads (PLA). Halloween Costumes Outlet has a clickthrough rate of 1.3% and Amazon has a CTR of 0.3%.
Multi-channel retailers perform far better in PLA than text ads. The target company ranked fourth with a CTR of 8.6%. Home Depot has generated a 4.5% share of the People’s Liberation Army click-throughs in the Halloween keyword group, mostly used for advertising clothing and accessories, which may be more known. Barnes & Noble gained a share of 1.8%, while Wal-Mart received a 1.1% share of clicks.
