Halloween is less than eight weeks away, and that means people are already starting to search for costumes and other ideas for October 31. Bing Ads has released new data on search performance around the holiday showing that searches — and ad impressions — increase steadily through September and October.

Looking at desktop ad click-through rates for searches on things like candy, decorations and parties, Bing Ads found that CTRs increased beginning the first week of October. The exception was for decorations, which saw CTRs peak that first week of October and then begin to decline thereafter.

On costume-related ads, CTRs typically topped out in the second week of October and continued to decline going into Halloween. Below are the stats for PCs and tablets, but the mobile numbers reflected a similar trend.

CPCs were fairly steady throughout the two-month lead-up to Halloween, the exceptions being in Decorations, which saw CPCs increase rather sharply in the two weeks ahead of the big day and, conversely, Party-related ads, which saw CPCs drop substantially after September.

Bing Ads has also shared the most popular search terms and recommended ad copy combinations by device and category and other tips. You can view the full presentation on SlideShare.