Much ado is made about the lead-up to the holiday marketing season—and particularly, the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales period. But once that’s over, there’s still about a month’s worth of marketing to do until Christmas. During this time, eCommerce digital marketers need to be on their toes to diagnose problems quickly and make necessary adjustments if sales targets aren’t being met.
In this blog, we’ll lay out all the important aspects of post-BFCM marketing that you’ll need to have in mind to produce a successful holiday season for your brand.
Diagnosing Underperforming Holiday eCommerce Campaigns
During the holiday season, you need to be constantly evaluating performance to monitor for any dips in efficiency. Generally, paid social ad performance is best assessed over one-week or longer timeframes, but during the holidays brands and advertisors don’t have that luxury.
When analyzing short-term performance—say, a period of 2 or 3 days—secondary KPIs like ad engagement (likes, comments, shares) and click-through rate can be used as key indicators of success. If engagement and click-through rates are higher than average, there’s a strong likelihood that the ad will perform well on primary KPIs like CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) or ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) with more investment.
Conversely, if these metrics are underwhelming, a closer look at factors like CPM (cost per thousand impressions) or video watch time can help pinpoint the root cause of poor performance and guide corrective action.
Managing Bids and Budgets Between Black Friday and Christmas
To maximize holiday returns, brands need to manage their budgets based on key deadlines.
BFCM Budgets: During Black Friday/Cyber Monday, brands will spend up to 50% of their monthly ad budget. During this time, the focus is all on deals—so it’s important to funnel that budget towards ads that feature competitive offers. The most aggressive offers, like large (50%+) site-wide discounts, tend to perform best.
December Budgets: As December unfolds, eCommerce brands should align budgets with key deadlines like shipping cutoffs, gift-with-purchase promotions, and end-of-season sales. For example, that might mean ramping up spend prior to your shipping deadline (“Order by x date to get before Christmas”) to drive holiday gift-giving conversions in early-to-mid December.
It’s also critical that brands not turn social media marketing off completely at any point in December. Maintaining a consistent presence keeps your brand at the top of shoppers’ minds as they finalize their holiday purchases and transition into post-Christmas shopping. Even after Christmas Day, people will have received gift cards they’re ready to spend—or will have not received a product they were hoping to get as a gift and now feel primed to treat themselves.
If you’re running smaller promotions, like a gift-with-purchase offer in December, consider increasing your budget during those periods to amplify your reach and maximize ROI. These strategic boosts can capture audiences who are more likely to convert due to the added value. Gift-with-purchase offers are also great for encouraging higher cart values. A free gift with a higher order value will help encourage adding products to their purchase before finalizing their checkout.
Finally, if you have remaining stock from the 2024 season, use the days after Christmas to run targeted clearance or promotional campaigns. This approach not only helps clear inventory but also gives your final few days of Q4 a revenue boost, ensuring you finish the year strong before diving into new initiatives for 2025.
Is It Too Late to Shift Your Creative or Messaging After BFCM?
The short answer here is: No.
The days immediately after Black Friday and the following week still offer significant opportunities to improve your paid social performance. If you’re working with ADM, the team will be monitoring outcomes closely throughout Black Friday weekend and beyond, therefore you’ll have the opportunity to adjust as needed.
Brands should be testing a couple of variations of copy and social media ad creative from the start of their BFCM promos and quickly determining the winning versions in the initial day or two of the sale.
If a brand’s Black Friday does not kick off with satisfactory results, it can be challenging—but it’s not too late to pivot over the weekend. First, a brand must determine what is not working. If the ads are successfully driving high volume to the website it may be a landing page issue. If the ads and the site vary in the way they present the offer, this could also be causing confusion resulting in higher landing page bounce rates.
If the ads are driving lower-than-expected clicks and engagement, the offer, creative, and messaging should all be evaluated. With less time for small adjustments and shifts Black Friday is the time to take bigger swings and make bigger changes when a larger shift in results is critical.
In recent years, ADM worked with a client who had a softer-than-expected start to their promotions week. Through analysis of the early results, we identified that the offer was the most likely cause of the slow performance. Through collaboration and quick action, the brand was able to shift its promo offer. The creative and copy were therefore adjusted and the impact on results quickly followed. Adjustments like this are crucial for e-commerce businesses that rely on high purchase volume during this sale period.
Handling Inventory Shortages or Low-Stock Warnings
Inventory challenges are an unfortunate reality for many brands during the holiday season. While it’s always nice to sell a lot of products, greeting users with advertisements for products they can’t actually buy will end up being a big deterrent to sales. The best way to safeguard against this is by diversifying ad creative.
The most successful brands have ad creative that focus on single products, as well as product sets and the brand more holistically. Even if a single product sells out, you can simply turn off the creative associated with it without derailing the rest of your campaign.
When a product is low on stock, it is great to highlight that on the website to drive urgency in conversion actions, however, ADM would not advise adjusting your paid social messaging to highlight low stock or inventory. The reason for this is that low-stock products often are already being advertised and going to sell out without changes to the ads. It takes time for new ads to ramp up and when a product is low on inventory there is no luxury of time. This is why highlighting urgency on the website is advised over highlighting it in a paid social ad.
Leveraging Paid Social Promotions for Last-Minute Holiday Sales
After BF/CM, creating urgency around existing promotions is key. It is not advisable to completely change your promotions or discounts once BF/CM has begun unless performance is significantly suffering. However, you can create urgency for your promo in its final days by using “last call” language with specific dates and times indicating the conclusion of the promotion.
If you need to layer an additional discount atop your existing promotions, we recommend sending notice of those additional savings to your already-warm audiences. Think text message subscribers, email subscribers, app downloaders, and social media followers. This additional promotion should also be advertised on the site to help increase the conversion rate of all traffic being driven to the site during that time.
What If Revenue Targets Aren’t Being Met by Mid-December?
If your holiday sales are trending sluggishly, it’s worth considering making a change. You can opt to extend your Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals through Christmas, framing it with messaging like “Black Friday Deals All Season Long.” You can also layer additional offers or incentives on top of your landing pages to increase site conversions.
For the final run to Christmas, it’s also helpful to double down on language relating to gifting—and what great gifts your products will make. Even as shipping cutoff dates approach and pass, you can still emphasize the appeal of your products as gifts through the sale of online gift cards, keeping those last-minute gifters from showing up to the holiday function empty-handed.
Collecting Paid Social Insights to Prepare for Next Holiday Season
The holiday season is typically a treasure trove of insights that you can gather and analyze to improve performance not just for next holiday season, but all year round. Although you’ll probably have to wait until the holiday dust settles to take a full accounting of what worked and what didn’t, keep these questions in mind throughout to inform your analysis later:
What demographics are responding best to your ads? Identifying what audiences were most likely to convert from your ads will help inform strategy for the future. Not only will it show you the audiences that your ads were most effective at reaching, it’ll provide insight into underperforming audiences so you can begin formulating a plan for how you’ll make gains with them in the year that follows.
What are your best-performing creative themes? Ideally, you will be testing different creative mediums, styles, and messages, each with their own distinct objectives. Identifying the themes that are resonating best will give you a head start on future ideation and creative production.
What creatives or messages are driving website visits? Sometimes ads will be very efficient at driving traffic to your site, but that traffic will fail to translate into conversions at the same rate as others. Identifying these ads and diagnosing where the breakdowns occurred—misleading messages? Bad landing pages?—will be essential to creating a more successful paid social sales funnel for the year to come.
Outside of analyzing your brand’s own performance, try to evaluate competitor ads and trends across the social advertising landscape. This can help you uncover new approaches to the holiday season and unlock more potential for future strategy development.
Planning for Paid Social Holiday Success This Year and Beyond
Remember, no two holiday seasons are the same. In election years like 2024, advertising space on platforms like Facebook can be hotly contested at the start of Q4, leading to less efficient advertising—and this year, Black Friday/Cyber Monday fell later in November than typical, leading to a shorter sales crunch leading up to Christmas. Keep these factors in mind when you evaluate holiday performance and try to parse out trends that might have been impacted by outside forces.
As we progress in this holiday season, make sure you’re also leveraging your ads to bolster your outreach lists. Start building strong email and SMS lists now, as these channels are invaluable for driving conversions during future holiday campaigns. And if you’re looking for a paid social marketing agency to elevate your eCommerce performance for 2025 and beyond, consider reaching out to the ADM team below:
