I've spent a fair amount of time so far this year doing ad hoc analysis of year-over-year January performance for a handful of subscription ecomm brands. To make sure I wasn't missing any macro trends, I analyzed Facebook campaign data for a basket of North American focused, D2C subscription ecomm clients (10 in total). I pulled data for Jan 1-12, 2020 (Jan 1 was a Wednesday last year) and Jan 1-12, 2021 (Jan 1 was a Friday this year). MTD (Jan 1-12, 2021) spends for these brands range from $100k on the low end to $1m on the high end, but most are in the $300-500k range.
I really wanted to see how Cost per 1,000 People Reached and Cost per Unique Outbound Click compared to see if there was a uniform cost increase across these campaigns. I also pulled Spend YoY, as most of our clients have increased their spend YoY (which adds a massive variable to any time period performance comparisons, obviously).
Here is what I found:
These brands saw a pretty consistent ~20% increase in Cost per 1,000 People Reached, but there is a great deal more variability on the CPCs, and that's despite our average client spending ~80% more year over year. For me, this data confirms the more or less consistent CPM increases on the platform which have been observed/commented on countless times, but at least for these clients we aren't seeing CPCs rise at the same rate.
Notably, I did not include CVR or CAC data, as many of these clients use attribution windows that really require a little bit more time to allow for a reasonable year over year comparison. Perhaps in a subsequent post I'll come back and look at CVR and CAC YoY as well!