Retail's Peak Advantage Is Already Being Decided

Q4 covers Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the holiday shopping weeks that follow, the busiest stretch of the year for retail advertisers. The U.S. Census Bureau puts Q4 2025 e-commerce sales at $365.2 billion, close to 30% of the $1.234 trillion Americans spent online across the year.

With so much online spending concentrated in a few weeks, the months before peak provide an important window, for making the decisions that will determine where budget goes when demand rises.

The brands that make the most of that window use Q4 for exactly what it’s best suited to: putting greater investment behind approaches that have already proven to work.

Start testing now to build your peak plan

Peak is getting closer. If you haven’t started testing yet, now is the time to focus on the decisions that will shape what you scale during peak.

A Fospha report shows how the brands that generated the highest return on ad spend (ROAS) during Q4 2025 approached this. The top 25% of brands by Q4 ROAS ran 51% more campaigns during the pre-peak period than they did during peak.

That extra activity went toward testing formats, creative directions and audience strategies at a lower-stakes pace. By the time peak arrived, those brands had tested what worked and built a refined set of campaigns ready to scale. With greater confidence in those campaigns, they increased spend per campaign during peak by 48% year over year, putting more budget behind proven approaches.

This creates a simple progression: test, learn, refine, then scale.

Earlier testing creates more room to learn and act

CPM (cost per thousand impressions): CPMs, the price of 1,000 ad impressions, run higher during peak than through the rest of the year. Gupta Media’s 2024 Meta CPM tracker found that Cyber Monday CPMs reached $17.70, 138% above the annual average of $7.43. A test run earlier can therefore generate useful learning without using peak-priced media to find the answer.

As Niket Shah, co-founder of Acceler8 Labs, puts it: “If your first touchpoint with a customer is a Black Friday ad, you’re paying peak prices to introduce yourself.”

Recoverability: Earlier testing also leaves more time to act on what you learn. It’s recommended that brands get campaigns live 1–2 conversion cycles before peak, giving teams time to assess performance and make adjustments before demand and media costs rise. By peak week, there is far less room to iterate without affecting the plan when it matters most.

Four decisions worth settling before peak

1. Creative

Test different creative angles, such as a founder-led video against a static product shot, or a discount-led message against one built around social proof. The aim is to understand which ideas are worth developing further before peak creative is finalized.

2. Audience

Take audiences that perform well at a modest level of spend and test how they respond as investment increases. This gives teams a clearer view of which audiences can support greater budget when peak arrives.

3. Media mix

Use the months before peak to understand how different channels contribute across the customer journey. Looking beyond individual platform results can help inform where budget should sit across the wider media mix when investment increases.

4. Offer

Test how different offer structures affect conversion. That could mean a percentage discount against a fixed-value offer, a bundle against a single-product promotion, or a free-shipping threshold. These decisions can influence both conversion and the economics of the peak period.

The goal is to identify the decisions that will have the greatest influence on the peak plan, then use the time available to build evidence around them.

Those learnings also become more valuable as more campaign optimization moves into automated systems.

Earlier learning gives automated campaigns more to work with

A growing share of paid-media campaigns now use automated systems such as Meta’s Advantage+, Google’s Performance Max and TikTok’s Smart+. These platforms use campaign data to help determine how ads are delivered and where budget is allocated.

That makes pre-peak testing useful beyond the immediate decision a marketer is trying to make. Campaigns running earlier in the year are also generating data that automated systems can learn from.

Starting earlier gives these systems time to learn from real campaign data before peak. For example, Google Ads guidance recommends running new Performance Max campaigns for at least six weeks to give its machine-learning systems enough time to gather data and optimize performance.

By Q4, the objective is to have moved from learning what might work to scaling what the earlier months have helped establish.

Make the remaining time count for peak

There is still time to test the decisions that will have the biggest impact on peak. The priority now is to focus that time on the areas where learning can still change what you do in Q4.

Start with the decision that would be most costly to leave until peak. Testing it now gives you time to assess the result, adjust where needed and use what you learn to shape your peak plan before costs increase.

The earlier those decisions are established, the more of Q4 can be spent acting on them.