Summer presents both opportunities and challenges for advertisers. Consumer behavior shifts as vacations, holidays, and key promotions periods compete for attention, often leading to fluctuating engagement and conversion rates. While many brands experience softer performance during the summer months, those that use this time as an opportunity to test new creative, optimize budgets, and maintain a full funnel paid social strategy are often best positioned for success heading into the Fall.
Here are a few specific strategies we recommend to help brands get the most out of their social investment this summer.
Understand How Consumer Behavior Changes
Summer doesn't necessarily mean consumers stop shopping, they may just shop differently.
While people continue discovering brands and interacting with ads, they're often less ready to purchase immediately as disposable income is spent on travel, entertainment, and other seasonal expenses. This makes upper-funnel engagement and remarketing even more important.
Lean Into Seasonal Creative
Creative is often the biggest lever advertisers can pull during slower periods.
Summer messaging should feel fresh and reflect the season without forcing promotions and messages on users that ultimately don't align with the brand.
Consider incorporating:
Bright, seasonal imagery paired with on-brand seasonal value propositions
Outdoor lifestyle photography that demonstrates summer use cases
Vacation-inspired messaging
User-generated content to capture top of funnel engagement
Fast-paced video demonstrating products in relevant real-life settings
Refreshing creative every few weeks is key to combating ad fatigue, particularly on Meta and TikTok where creative newness heavily influences performance.
Reallocate Budget Based on Seasonal Performance
Summer is an especially important time to evaluate channel efficiency when setting budgets, rather than maintaining static ad spend.
Thoroughly analyze which campaigns and channels are consistently generating the most profitable returns or the strongest top-of-funnel efficiency, then reallocate investment accordingly.
For example:
Allocate more spend to creative formats with stronger engagement, such as Reels or TikTok Spark Ads.
Reduce investment in campaigns experiencing rising CPMs and declining conversion rates.
Reserve budget for major promotional / key shopping moments like Back to School or Labor Day if historical performance shows stronger returns.
Don't Ignore Upper-Funnel Campaigns
When performance softens, it's tempting to cut awareness campaigns entirely and focus only on campaigns generating conversions and strong ROAS. While revenue efficiency remains important, eliminating top-of-funnel campaigns can shrink your future retargeting audience and make conversion campaigns even more expensive over time, which is especially detrimental as we approach fall & the holidays.
That said, summer campaigns should be evaluated holistically and measured beyond revenue and ROAS. Metrics such as click through rate, video completion rate, and add to cart rate can provide valuable signals that future conversions are being built even if purchases temporarily soften. Identifying where performance trends exist among these metrics can also help uncover which creative messaging is most impactful at grabbing users attention and moving them along the path to purchase.
Prepare for Fall While Summer Is Still Running
One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is waiting until September to begin planning for fall campaigns.
Summer is the ideal time to:
Test new creative concepts
Build remarketing audiences
Identify winning messaging
The learnings gathered during summer campaigns can significantly improve efficiency heading into higher volume shopping periods.
Final Thoughts
While conversion rates may soften during the summer, the season presents a valuable opportunity to improve long-term performance. By leveraging seasonal content, proactively reallocating budgets based on performance, and maintaining a balanced full-funnel approach, brands can maximize efficiency during the summer months while setting themselves up for stronger results in the busy shopping season ahead.
Instead of viewing summer as a period to simply maintain performance, use it as an opportunity to learn, optimize, and build momentum for what's next.