Fashion and beauty usually strong categories for end-of-year sales, but with people stuck at home and prioritizing essential purchases due to the pandemic in 2020, consumers were spending less on clothes, makeup, and accessories. According to Statista, fashion revenues in the UK in 2020 dropped by 9.7% compared to 2019.
Still, Taboola was able to pinpoint some niche readership trends across these verticals at the end of last year:
At-home beauty: The keyword “hair color" saw a pageview spike of 238%.
Self-care: The keyword “pedicure" saw a whopping 2,508% increase in pageviews.
Comfort: The keyword “sweatpants" saw a 632% increase in pageviews.
Now let’s look at how 2020 holiday shopping actually shaped up.
While both overall retail sales and fashion sales specifically dropped significantly in 2020, there was a sub-section of fashion retailers that thrived in the new normal.
Specifically, online-only fast fashion retailers such as Boohoo, ASOS, In The Style and Very.co.uk all reported like-for-like sales growth during the 2020 Christmas season. These retailers, which offer affordable clothing options and the convenience of online shopping and fast delivery, proved a popular choice for a mid-pandemic Christmas. Meanwhile, these brands’ high street competitors such as Primark, which famously does not have an online store, suffered drops in sales as high as 30%.
Interestingly, Cornwall-based retailer Seasalt, which specialises in durable clothing for the outdoors, also reported a 17% growth in sales as consumers invested in practical apparel for UK staycations and retreats to nature.
Advertisers can take advantage of trending news topics and build more effective and engaging campaigns by figuring out which types of ad creative their audience responds to most.
We pulled our Taboola Trends data in the UK fashion and beauty categories in August 2021 to discover which images, videos, and headlines drive the most clicks in these industries.
Use the Taboola Title Analyzer to find the best-performing titles for your campaign. It tests your headline options against each other to pinpoint the ones with the highest-predicted CTR.
It’s easy to see that “7 Beauty Tips for Self-Care Success” is expected to drive the highest CTR while “Need a Better Skin Routine? These Solutions Can Help” is down at the bottom with a low-predicted CTR.
Predicted
CTR
7 Beauty Tips for Self-Care Success
Fashion & Beauty Website
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Fashion & Beauty Website
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Fashion & Beauty Website
We’ve compiled the top products and strategies marketers like you can use to shape campaigns during high-performing seasons like Black Friday and Christmas.
Video ads
Static images
Descriptions and calls to action (CTAs)
Repurposing social media content
SmartBid auto-optimizes your bids at scale. This tool does the heavy lifting for you, automatically identifying your ideal audience and adjusting your bids for the right opportunities. Fixed Bid lets you manually adjust your bids.
Learn more about Taboola’s bidding strategies here.
Install the Taboola Pixel
Targeting Strategies
Sportswear giant Adidas needed to increase awareness for its new BOOST footwear technology and distinguish it from its legacy product lines. They leveraged Taboola Video to share content at scale across premium publisher websites — with overlaid CTAs that enticed viewers to click and convert.
Adidas saw a 50% uplift in CTR and 25% higher CTR than other video platforms. The black men’s model of the BOOST footwear presented in the video also became a best-seller as a result.
Tech beauty startup eSalon offers custom-blended hair color for at-home application. With such a unique product, the brand was eager to spread awareness and reach just the right customers who might be interested in what they have to offer.
eSalon used Taboola’s expansive Data Marketplace to segment and target highly engaged audiences. The brand also leveraged Taboola’s storytelling platform to reach those readers with organic, long-form content about its offerings.
As a result, eSalon grew by 15X since working with Taboola, acquiring tens of thousands of new customers and increasing CTR by 53%.
In 2020, consumers started their holiday shopping as early as October, proving that it’s never too soon to start your seasonal campaign planning. Advertisers need to be ready with the outreach strategies and creative content they need to make their messages heard.
Just remember to stay on top of emerging trends, make data-backed decisions, and access the right tools and platforms to fuel your campaigns through the end of 2021 and beyond.