Ramadan 2027 should start around the 8th of February. Most brands didn’t plan for it yet.
Last Ramadan, for one of our clients, things were looking good as we started in late January. We had very good progress on the videos, mostly. The static images were doing also well, but they are not getting a lot of clicks.
They had a Ramadan calendar and we wanted to sell out before Ramadan. We were pushing so hard. We had a problem on YouTube that the campaign is just not spending, but we’re live on TikTok, and we scaled Facebook, and it’s going well on Facebook. And the people that are coming are new, like completely new. They never know about the brand. This is the first time they buy, first time they buy the calendar, and that’s their first product. I’ve been checking Shopify.
Once Ramadan starts, we will kill the calendar, which will reduce the spend dramatically. We will pause it. It will be sold out anyway, so there’s no use to keep it.
So usually the first week of Ramadan would be the snacks. We’re going to keep focus on the snacks. And the second week we lower the budget a little bit because people are not buying as much as they do before Ramadan. And then we have the last two weeks of Ramadan, usually we have very low sales. So we have to be prepared for that. We will see there’s a drop in conversion, but when we look at the total month, it’s fine. But we should be prepared for the Eid, at least one week before the Eid.
That was snacks. Your category will be different, so check your own numbers from last Ramadan.
Basically the videos are the best, because videos are scalable, and they give us more impressions at lower cost, and people engage with the videos. Like, if they don’t like it, they will just skip it. If they like it, they watch it. So we understand how they are behaving or how they are interacting with it, but on the picture, we don’t know because they could be just seeing it and doing nothing, and it’s just not as capable as the videos.
TikTok, we had mixed results. We had some months where it was really good, then suddenly nothing happened. The same campaign with the same everything, but in Ramadan, I think it’s worth it. Honestly, on TikTok the cost is higher. We can start also building audiences on TikTok, like people who visit organically on TikTok, and running remarketing for them. And we start testing slowly without just like burning a lot of budget on TikTok.
Having six days is a very small window, because usually the campaigns will take some time to optimize. Don’t launch the week before.
Tracking. We have the Apple iOS update since iOS 14. They hide the attribution. They don’t allow you to get the information. So anything that comes from Facebook will be reported as direct. So when it says direct, does not mean someone always went to the website. And the email tools, they calculate the view. Like if you opened an email last week and you just converted, it will add it to the email. Even if we just send a thank you message, it will claim that it did it because it just opened the email. With one client it’s been three months, and every day I’m trying to find a solution for it. We need to add those things, which we call them URL parameters, on any video that we are doing on social. For me personally, I think it’s too much headache to just focus on the reporting rather than focusing on the results and how we can improve the results and how we can grow the brand and the business.
Get the approvals done before the month starts. The first day, I think that would be difficult. Because we’ll stay up at night for suhoor, so I don’t think it will be very convenient.
And keep talking to those new customers after Eid.
What did your sales do last Ramadan, week by week?
(Ahmad Alshareefi is Founder, Big AL Consulting)
