What are your advertising plans for Mother’s Day? Are you targeting mobile users? Will you use video? These are all questions to think about leading up to the holiday (Mother’s Day is May 10^th in the United States this year). To help you decide, we focused this week’s insights on how video influences retail purchases, the completion rate of native video on mobile, and a breakdown of Mother’s Day conversations and audiences on Facebook.

This chart from the Video Commerce Benchmarks Report by Invodo highlights the influence that video has on purchase decisions. Online shoppers who view a video on a web page are 1.6 times likely to purchase on average than shoppers who did not see a video. Video is an effective media format that can attract a consumers attention on a website to drive sales, so try using video in your social advertising efforts to bring users to your eCommerce site.

When you start using video, the question then arises as to where and how. Native ads – including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn ads – are effective for engaging consumers because they seamlessly integrate into the content users are there to consume. This chart from Celtra shows how native ads outperformed other ad formats on engagement (14.0% vs. 9.8%) and Click Through Rate (CTR; 10.6% vs. 3.5%).

The same report shows how when you use video ads on mobile devices, you get dramatically higher video view (9.7% vs 6.2%) and completion rates when you place your ads within mobile apps instead of as a part of a mobile website. Facebook’s mobile app consumes the most user time of any app today, and with Facebook video ads, you can track exactly how much of a video has been viewed, and create custom audiences to target consumers who watched all or part of your videos.

A great time to use video is during holidays like Mother’s day where conversations on Facebook span the globe. Facebook IQ shared this infographic which shows that 84 million people joined the conversation about Mother’s Day on Facebook last year and 27% of users in the United States buy gifts for multiple people. Additionally, there are 40 million mothers on Facebook, 77% of which are connected to their children and 75% of who access Facebook on mobile. The key to advertising leading up to this day is to target expansively, since virtually everyone knows someone to acknowledge on this day. The top countries for conversation measure by percent of DAU are Singapore (68%), Australia (67%), the US (64%), Canada (59%), and New Zealand (57%).

Check out how Atomic 212's retail client uses social.com to drive eCommerce Sales in this Case Study!