We tracked over $50M in Meta ad spend in May 2024… Here’s what we saw

Another month, another peek at ad performance across hundreds of DTC brands. With so much data, we can take a macro-level view of what’s happening in the world of eCommerce. With that said, here’s what stuck out to us when we looked at Meta performance across all categories in May 2024 compared to the month prior.

To form this dataset, we analyzed a subset of ~500 customer accounts (brands over $1M GMV) on a 7DC1DV attribution window. These eCommerce brands operate across various categories, including fashion, beauty, health and wellness, pet care, food and beverage, and more.

Let’s dive in.

Overall Trends

May was a busy month featuring two major holidays – Mother’s Day and Memorial Day – and the unofficial start of the summer season.

As a result of increased ad spend and competition during holiday periods, the top of the funnel took a hit across the board with CPM (+11.36%) and CPC (+13.27%) up and CTR (-1.69%) down slightly.

When we zoom into week-over-week performance, we see upper funnel metrics peaked the week before Memorial Day (5/27). No surprises here.

At the bottom of the funnel, ROAS (+13.51%) saw a nice lift and CPA (-0.67%) stayed relatively flat month-over-month. 

Despite ads getting more expensive during seasonal holidays, flat CPAs indicate that this high-demand period did not adversely affect overall ad efficiency. Interestingly, you might expect ROAS to drop during holiday promotions, but AOV (+13.33%) saw a strong uptick, likely as a result of gifting and brands getting creative with their promos, leading to a higher return on ad spend. 

What kind of offer did you run? Did you see more items per order or are customers springing for higher price point items when they go on sale?

One more observation – Despite a Meta outage at the end of the month on May 31-June 3, overall ad performance remained stable. We’ll report on how this outage may have caused downstream effects in June.

Mother’s Day / Memorial Day Promos

Holiday shopping seasons are often dominated by deal hunters. A compelling offer can be the deciding factor for a shopper. So the question is: what should your promotion actually be?

Sitewide deal? Select SKUs? Gift with purchase? Free shipping? Buy X, get Y?

Truth is, no single promo structure will work universally. Experimentation is how you’ll figure out what works best for your business.

One promo tactic we saw several brands run with much success is the tiered discount.

Tiered discounts can be a great way to drive up AOV – especially during time-boxed deals and flash sales. Offer customers larger discounts based on hitting pre-defined spend thresholds. The more a customer spends, the greater the discount.

Here’s an example:

If your AOV is $40...

- Get 10% off $49+
- Get 20% off $99+
- Get 30% off $199+

This type of offer encourages consumers to purchase a larger quantity of products (or a few higher ticket items) with each order placed.

Category Trends

For the month of May 2024, some categories had ad metric trends that differed from the overall cohort. If your business is part of these verticals, did you experience something similar?

💄 Beauty: -4.35% decrease in CPC, +16.29% increase in CTR, -7.57% lower CPA

👕 Fashion: +5.26% increase in CTR, +0.40% increase in AOV, +2.12% increase in ROAS

🍔 Food & Bev: -6.29% decrease in CPM, -2.03% decrease in CPC

Overall, some interesting trends coming from the data! If you’re curious how other categories performed, email us at hello@proxima.ai. We can even layer on your own ad data to benchmark your performance to that of your peers.

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