Trends by Triple Whale: Week of May 13, 2024

Another week, another wave of data trends headed your way! 

This past half of a fortnight featured a special holiday in the USA and Canada: Mother’s Day. Were you one of the last-minute gift certificate purchasers you may see reflected in the revenue? Did Mother’s Day have an impact on cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS) over this past week, or was it more relevant in early May? 

When we take a look at the trends data for the week of May 5, 2024 to May 12, 2024, a few interesting things pop out at us:

Meta Performance: A Higher CPA

Across all industries, we noticed a slightly higher (+4.74%) CPA for Meta ads at $38.38. It’s possible DTC brands were spending more money surrounding the Mother’s Day event, and perhaps trying to draw from broader pools of customers. More ad dollars spent but less actual purchases means a higher CPA, which could be a reason for that increase this past week. The other metrics we track in the Trends dashboard all showed a very slight downward trend (ROAS down -0.82%, CPC down -0.88%, and CPM down -0.83%), which wasn’t a huge difference compared to last week. 

Google Ad Performance: A Much Higher CPA

When we view the data across all industries, we can see a major change in cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for Google Ads at $22.31, which is an increase of +19.43% over last week. However, while Meta’s performance didn’t drop as much with that increased cost, the ROAS for Google Ads was down -8.53%, while CPM and CPC were both higher than the week previous (+3.13% and +4.91%, respectively).  

TikTok Ad Performance: A Higher CPA, Lower ROAS

Advertising on TikTok is a hot ticket right now, but with CPA increased by 8.14% over last week, our cohort had a harder time acquiring customers last week. Also, a drop in ROAS by 5.26% indicates less efficient spending on this platform. Cost-per-click (CPC) also had a small increase of 3.82% and Cost-per-mille (CPM) was up by 2.54%, which falls in line with the above assertion. 

Mother’s Day Isn’t Just About Moms, But Also Opportunistic Buyers

As mentioned above, last week might not have been the best time to buy a present from an online store if you hoped to gift it to the mother figure in your life by Sunday evening. 

However, it’s not only people searching for gifts who might click on an ad for a Mother’s Day sale. Some customers might be familiar with your brand and simply waiting for a sale to make the purchase. I might not be a mother, but I’ll take the 30% off thankyouverymuch.

We took a look at the cohort of certain industries that we’d expect to be popular on this holiday, and there were definitely some changes in metrics compared to the full pool of industries above. Here’s the lowdown: 

💄 Health & Beauty: Meta CPC down by 2.84%, TikTok CPA down by 9.04%

💍 Fashion Accessories: Meta ROAS up 3.55%, Meta CPC down 3.73%, TikTok ROAS up 7.82%

🏡 Home & Garden: TikTok ROAS up 20.38%!

🪀 Toys & Hobbies: Google CPC down 7.60%, and Meta ROAS up 24.77%!

Overall, some interesting trends coming from the data! If you’re curious how other industries performed, you can check out our free Trends tool here. You can even add your own ad data to benchmark your performance to that of your peers. It’s cool, you should check it out!

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