• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 9, 2021

Brands are running more holiday advertisements this year compared with last year, according to the SaaS platform AdImpact, which tracks and analyzes advertising occurrence and expenditure data across traditional and emerging media channels.

AdImpact analyzed ads from this year that used the keywords Holiday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Yuletide, and saw that advertising began earlier this year. 

Advertising peaked earlier this year -- beginning on November 14, 2021, compared with November 29, 2020. AdImpact tracked 55,000 ads at the peak of the 2021 holiday season, compared with 39,000 from last year. 

eMarketer expects 2021 to be the first year that U.S. holiday ecommerce will surpass $200 billion in sales. Platforms like eBay continue to make changes to support the increase. One interesting change on eBay is a feature that provides monthly keyword search counts.

Advertisers can now see how many times shoppers have searched "suggested" keywords in the last 30 days.

This new enhancement, announced at the end of November, gives sellers increased visibility into keyword competitiveness and the volume of searches over time to help make more informed and strategic decisions on which keywords to target, and the value of each keyword to the brands.

eBay also now allows advertisers to see the number of negative keywords in each of ad group on the campaign overview page.

This additional information gives marketers an up front view of the entire campaign, making it easier to ensure it’s ready to launch. When setting keyword bids, negative keywords will now appear on a separate tab.

Negative keywords do not require bids because these are terms marketers are trying to prevent an ad from triggering.

When a buyer searches for a term added as a negative keyword, the ads are not eligible to serve up on the page.