Black Friday marks the official start of deep discounts and the holiday shopping period for U.S. consumers, coupled with the increasing importance of Cyber Monday, which this year produced a record $2.04 billion in online sales, according to Comscore. The holiday shopping period has been moving earlier and earlier as well, with some retailers opening their doors on Thanksgiving, and others offering their sales the week before Thanksgiving, like Target did this year.

However for advertisers looking to reach their audiences and market their products, holiday shopping historically results in increased media costs as more advertisers bid on a fixed amount of inventory. Facebook in both 2013 and 2014 proves to follow this trend, with U.S. media costs of an index of Social.com customers rising a full 70%, from $3.59 to $6.10 CPM, between the start of November and Cyber Monday on December 1st. This sharp increase matches a similar 79% increase in 2013.

Consumers are responding well to the holiday advertising, though. The average CTR rose 26% to 0.15% at the end of the month, as advertisers on Facebook had success targeting the right audiences using Facebook. Overall, for the month of November, we saw an overall CPM of Facebook advertisers targeting US consumers of $4.47.

As the holiday season gets into full swing, Facebook has historically had a large jump in advertising revenue. Last year, Facebook’s advertising revenue in the United States jumped from $962 million in Q3 to $1.2 billion in Q4, an increase of 25%. While Facebook doesn’t break out its monthly numbers, most of that increase probably came in the current holiday season, and there will likely be a similar increase over Q3 2014’s $1.5 billion in U.S. revenue, especially given the strong growth we have seen so far. Social.com looks forward to helping you with your holiday campaigns! For more information, email globalsales@social.com.

This post was originally published on the Marketing Cloud blog.

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