Who's Winning Halloween Paid Search?

sam.engel Oct 29, 2015

After marketers got creative with their Back to the Future tie-ins last week, another marketing-friendly holiday is approaching quickly. Boo! It's almost Halloween already.

For the past week, we've been monitoring some Halloween-related keywords in paid search. Here are some points of interest that we've found. Read on—if you dare!


Who's Winning on "Halloween Candy"?

When it comes to Halloween candy, See's surprised us by showing up the most often. You don't tend to think See's for Halloween—at least I don't. (And if you do, maybe your neighborhood is where the trick-or-treaters should be going!)

Outside of that, the advertisers were predominantly retailers. M&M's also snuck in at #3.

Top Advertisers

  1. sees.com
  2. candy.com
  3. mms.com
  4. walmart.com
  5. amazon.com
  6. orientaltrading.com
  7. lamaisonduchocolat.us
  8. candywarehouse.com
  9. 1800flowers.com
  10. blaircandy.com

Who's Winning on "Halloween"?

Interestingly, it seems that advertisers are largely avoiding exact matches for "Halloween." The term might be a bit too general. It also gets a lot of volume this time of year, so that might make it too costly considering that it might be hard to monetize.

The only advertiser that showed up with any regularity was partycity.com, who promoted costumes.


Who's Winning on Halloween Costume Keywords?

We also monitored 25 of the most trafficked keywords related to Halloween costumes. The majority of advertisers were speciality costume and Halloween shops, but we also saw several major retailers (Walmart, Target, and Amazon) get into the game.

Top Advertisers

  1. halloweencostumes.com
  2. spirithalloween.com
  3. wholesalehalloweencostumes.com
  4. costumeexpress.com
  5. costumediscounters.com
  6. walmart.com
  7. target.com
  8. amazon.com
  9. costumesupercenter.com
  10. trendyhalloween.com

Candy Brands Running Their Own Ads

We also did some monitoring on the branded keywords of popular candies. What we found was a fair amount of advertising from the candy brands themselves. Here are just a few examples:

Butterfinger

Butterfinger-Halloween-Ad

Kit Kat

Kit-Kat-Halloween-Ad

Skittles

Skittles-Halloween-Ad

Topics: paid search

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