Facebook ads for a party supplies retailer

A seasonal party supplies business had tried for months to get Facebook ads working and was going nowhere. The first campaign returned more than they expected.

Jeff, Party supplies. Recorded December 2021.

Jeff sells party supplies built around holidays and seasons, alongside imported home decor, gifts and craft items from South America, Mexico and Central America. New Year’s Eve was the first campaign we ran together, which tells you how the business works: short, sharp windows where the whole season is decided in a few weeks.

They were not new to paid advertising. They had run pay-per-click on other platforms with reasonable success. Facebook was the one that would not click into place — a steeper learning curve than the team expected, and after a long stretch of trying to work it out themselves, no momentum to show for it.

Seasonal retail is the hardest place to learn on the job. A campaign that takes three weeks to find its footing has already missed the holiday it was built for, and the next opportunity is a year away.

The setup was deliberately light on their side. They supplied some artwork and photos, and the campaigns were built and run from there. Return on ad spend on that first campaign came in above what they had expected.

What Jeff highlights is the testing cadence rather than any single result — new ads, new copy, new creative continuously, with reporting that shows what each round did. That is what makes a seasonal calendar workable: each holiday starts from what the last one taught rather than from scratch.

If you sell into narrow seasonal windows, the ad account has to be ready before the window opens. Trying to learn during the season is how the season gets lost.

In Jeff’s words