Halloween 2026 was shaping up to be massive for retailers, with projections for consumer spending hitting new records thanks to people getting excited early and looking for something different. For our client, a specialty costume shop, we ran a campaign called “Spooky Styles Show” that put user-generated content (UGC) at the center of their entire retail strategy, turning customer photos and videos into our best-performing ads.
Key Takeaways
- We found putting 20-25% of the total budget toward paid promotion of the best-performing UGC was key for maximizing reach and engagement.
- A clear, incentivized call to action, our “Best Costume” contest had a tangible prize, is essential for getting people to participate.
- Using AI-driven tools for content tagging and sentiment analysis was the only way we could efficiently sort through hundreds of UGC submissions for targeted use.
- Plugging UGC straight into product pages, email marketing, and paid social ads cut our cost per conversion by up to 15% compared to our standard ad creative.
- A multi-stage approval process for UGC is a must-have to keep everything on-brand and legally sound before it goes live.
Our whole strategy for Spooky Styles Show was built on the real excitement people have for Halloween. We just needed to capture it. The plan was to get a ton of high-quality, authentic UGC of people wearing the costumes out in the wild and then push that content out everywhere that mattered. For the whole campaign, which ran from September 1st to November 5th, 2026, we had a total budget of $180,000.
We broke the campaign into three parts. First up was the “Costume Kickoff” in September. To get the ball rolling, we launched a social media contest called “The Ultimate Halloween Transformation,” asking people to send in photos and short videos of their Spooky Styles Show outfits. You can’t just ask for content (who has the time?), you have to offer something, so the grand prize was a $1,000 gift card plus a homepage feature for the week of Halloween. We pushed the contest with organic social and put $30,000 in ad spend behind it on Meta and TikTok, hitting the 18-34 crowd interested in cosplay, Halloween, and fashion.
October 1st to the 26th was phase two, “Spooky Show & Share,” where we really started pushing the content out. The submissions were overwhelming, we got over 2,500 entries, so our team used some AI-driven content analysis tools just to keep up and curate the best stuff based on creativity and how good the costume looked. Once we had our top picks, we put them everywhere: dedicated website galleries, customer photos right on the product pages, and the best videos became our paid social ads. This was our biggest spend, with a $100,000 paid media budget spread across Meta’s platforms (Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, and Google Display Network, focusing hard on retargeting and lookalike audiences.
Our final phase, “Last-Minute Looks & Lifts,” ran from October 27th through November 5th. This was all about closing the deal and getting some post-Halloween buzz. We took the absolute best-performing UGC from October and plastered it everywhere with urgent “last chance” messaging, showing off popular costume ideas that were still in stock. We also asked people to share their final party pics. The last $50,000 of the budget went here, mostly into performance ads on Meta and Google that were built for one thing: immediate purchases.
Creative Approach and Targeting
Our creative strategy was simple: use the customers themselves. Instead of slick, professional studio shots, our ads were just real people in their costumes. It built instant trust. A perfect example was a video ad we ran that showed five different people wearing the same popular witch costume in their own way, it blew the doors off the professional model version. It turns out that the raw, unedited vibe of real UGC works incredibly well with an audience that’s tired of glossy ads.
We got smarter with our targeting as the campaign went on. At first, for the contest, we went broad with interest targeting. But as the data came in, we got much sharper, building custom audiences of past buyers, people who looked at costumes but didn’t buy, and lookalike audiences of our top 5% of customers. Based on past sales, we also zeroed in geographically on cities and suburbs where people had more money to spend. Our ad copy was just as direct and fun, with lines like “Show us your Spooky Style!” and “Your costume, your moment.”
What Worked and What Didn’t
What Worked:
- Authenticity Drives Engagement: The numbers don’t lie. Our UGC ads got an average click-through rate (CTR) of 1.8%, which is double the 0.9% we saw from our normal, polished creative. People just prefer content that feels real.
- Cost Per Lead (CPL) for Contest Entries: We got contest submissions for a CPL of $1.25 which was right on target and gave us an incredible amount of content to work with.
- Improved ROAS: The return on ad spend (ROAS) was where we really saw the difference. UGC campaigns hit a 3.8x ROAS, while our standard campaigns were stuck at 2.5x. This just confirms that people are much more willing to buy when they see a product being used and enjoyed by someone like them.
- Product Page Conversions: Putting UGC galleries right on the product pages gave us a 12% increase in the conversion rate for those items. We also saw that customers spent about 30 seconds longer on any page that featured real customer photos.
- TikTok’s Visual Dominance: TikTok was a beast for short-form video UGC. It delivered the highest engagement rates of any platform and had the lowest cost per impression.
What Didn’t Work:
- Overly Curated UGC: Our first instinct to “clean up” some of the UGC with filters and edits was a total mistake. Engagement actually dropped. The audience wanted the raw, real stuff, so we quickly changed course and decided to use the content exactly as it was submitted, aside from basic cropping for format.
- Email Integration Challenges: Putting UGC into email newsletters just didn’t pop the way it did on social or the site. Between email’s static format and the nightmare of how different clients render images, the content lost its punch. For next time, we’ll need more dynamic email content or much better segmentation.
- Compliance and Legal Review Bottlenecks: We completely underestimated how long it would take to manually review thousands of submissions for content and consent. It created a huge bottleneck and delayed us from getting content out the door early in the campaign. A definite lesson learned.
Optimization Steps Taken
We had to make some changes on the fly. To fix our review bottleneck, we brought in an AI-powered content moderation tool that could automatically flag bad content and help with approvals. It cut our review time by 40% which meant the team could stop vetting every single photo and start thinking about where to best place the good ones.
We also started moving the money around based on what was working right then and there. TikTok was crushing it with a great ROAS, so in mid-October, we pulled $15,000 out of the Google Display Network and pushed it straight into TikTok. It was a simple move that let us double down on a winner. We were also constantly A/B testing our ad copy, where we found that a simple CTA change from “Get Yours Now” to “Shop the Look” boosted conversions by 7%.
Finally, we got way more specific with our retargeting. A generic “all visitors” bucket wasn’t cutting it, so we built out smaller, more focused groups like “viewed 3+ costume pages,” “cart abandoners,” or people who “engaged with contest posts.” This let us serve up super relevant ads. If you looked at superhero costumes, you’d see retargeting ads with other customers rocking superhero outfits, not some generic Halloween creative.
Metrics and Performance Data
The final numbers were strong. Across all channels, we hit 98 million impressions, and because the content was so authentic, it just worked. Our overall cost per conversion landed at $8.50, a 20% improvement over our non-UGC benchmark from last year. More importantly, people who saw the UGC ads converted at a rate of 3.1%, while those who only saw our old-school creative converted at just 1.9%.
Here’s a breakdown of key performance indicators:
Campaign Performance Metrics:
- Total Budget: $180,000
- Campaign Duration: 66 days (Sept 1 – Nov 5, 2026)
- Total Impressions: 98,000,000
- Overall CTR: 1.5%
- Total Conversions: 21,176
- Average Cost Per Conversion: $8.50
- Overall ROAS: 3.2x
UGC vs. Traditional Creative Comparison:
| Metric | UGC Creative | Traditional Creative |
|---|---|---|
| Average CTR | 1.8% | 0.9% |
| Average ROAS | 3.8x | 2.5x |
| Conversion Rate | 3.1% | 1.9% |
| Cost Per Conversion | $7.20 | $10.60 |
The data tells a simple story: UGC drives engagement and sales. The fact that our cost per conversion was so much lower with UGC shows just how efficient it is to let your customers do the marketing for you. It’s not complicated, people just trust other people more than they trust ads.
Going forward, UGC is going to be a huge part of our holiday campaigns. We’re already looking at bringing in some micro-influencers and figuring out how to get more dynamic video content from customers. What did we learn from the Spooky Styles Show campaign? In a noisy market, authentic content, when you put real budget behind it, just works.
For this retailer, using UGC for Halloween 2026 was a fundamental change in how they talk to their audience and make money. The lesson is simple: your customers are your best marketers. All you have to do is give them a platform and get out of the way.
What types of user-generated content were most effective for the Halloween campaign?
Short video clips, especially funny or creative ones for TikTok and Reels, did incredibly well. For static content, high-quality photos of people or groups in their costumes worked best for product galleries and retargeting ads.
How was the retailer able to manage and curate thousands of UGC submissions efficiently?
We used an AI-powered tool for the initial heavy lifting. It automatically flagged bad content and helped categorize everything by keywords and visuals, which let our small team focus on picking the winners instead of wading through every single submission.
What was the primary incentive for customers to submit their content?
A “Best Costume” contest with a $1,000 gift card grand prize was the biggest driver. The added promise of being featured on the retailer’s homepage and social channels was also a huge draw, mixing a cash prize with a bit of fame.
Which marketing channels yielded the best results for UGC distribution?
Paid social on Meta and TikTok gave us the best bang for our buck, with high CTRs and a good cost per conversion. Putting the UGC right on the website’s product pages also gave us a solid, direct lift in sales for those items.
What was a significant challenge encountered when implementing the UGC strategy?
We definitely underestimated the sheer man-hours needed for the legal and compliance review of all the submissions. It created a real bottleneck at the start and delayed some of our content from going live. Bringing in AI tools helped, but it was a big lesson learned.
