What did you cut for BFCM?
Your BFCM plan is mostly finished by now. Budgets committed, calendar locked, creative in production.
So here’s the question worth five minutes: which parts of it did anyone actually decide?
Take the December calendar. Almost every brand front-loads December 8 to 21 and goes quiet after Christmas. Nobody chose that. It’s inherited from when shipping cut-offs made the week before Christmas the last chance to sell anything.
The cost data says that window is now the single worst part of the season.
Triple Whale’s BFCM data puts Black Friday CPMs 57% above October, but cost per purchase 42% below it, because buyers arrive ready. Conversion rate in that sample rose 226%. Then the second week of December becomes the most expensive week of the entire season per purchase, 39% above October. Everyone is still bidding and the buyers have thinned out.
And the two weeks after Christmas, when most advertisers have gone home, come in roughly 25% cheaper than October.
So the default calendar spends heaviest in the worst week and goes dark in the best one.
The fix is a reallocation, not a rebuild: move 15 to 25% of your planned December 8 to 21 media into December 22 through January 4. The only reason this is urgent today is that it needs approval while the plan is still soft. In three weeks it’s locked and you’ll run last year’s calendar again by default.
The second thing running on autopilot is a budget migration nobody signs off on. As December pressure builds, spend quietly drifts from prospecting into retargeting, because retargeting ROAS reads better on every dashboard you own. It works for six weeks. Then you’ve drained the pool you were going to sell to in Q1, and January looks inexplicable.
The framing on this is blunt: cutting prospecting to double down on retargeting depletes the audience and stalls the brand. The dashboard will never tell you that, because the dashboard is measuring the six weeks, not the twelve months.
Neither of these is a mistake anyone made on purpose. That’s the point. Defaults are what run when everyone is busy, and the busiest six weeks of your year are the worst possible time for that.
We pulled the full picture together, including the week-by-week cost curve and what changed on the platforms since last BFCM, in the BFCM 2026 & Beyond Q5 report. It’s free and it’s 20 minutes.
Ask Your Team
“Last year’s BFCM growth number. How much of it was price, and how much was new customers?”
Green flag: the number split into AOV and new-customer count, with both trends.
Red flag: a single revenue figure. Salesforce has average selling price up 7% last season against order volume up 1%, and the NRF says nearly half of this year’s expected growth is higher prices. A brand can post record BFCM revenue with a smaller first-time cohort than the year before and not find out until February.
“What’s our prospecting-to-retargeting split, and what will it be on December 10?”
Green flag: two numbers, and a floor below which prospecting doesn’t go.
Red flag: “we’ll shift to whatever’s performing.” That sentence is how the Q1 problem gets created.
What Good Looks Like
Cost per purchase against an October baseline. Triple Whale BFCM data.
|
Window |
Cost per purchase vs October |
What to do |
|---|---|---|
|
Black Friday weekend |
42% cheaper |
spend into it. CPMs are up 57% and it doesn’t matter |
|
Dec 8 to 21 |
39% more expensive |
the week to trim. Move 15-25% out |
|
Dec 22 to Jan 4 |
about 25% cheaper |
where that budget goes. Most competitors are gone |
High CPMs are not the thing to optimize against. Cost per purchase is, and the two move in opposite directions during BFCM weekend. Any plan built to avoid expensive impressions will systematically avoid your cheapest customers.
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Ignore This Week
Loud right now. Safe to skip at your size.
TikTok’s ownership question is settled enough. It stopped being an existential planning risk this year. Plan the channel on its merits.
Tariff headlines. Three changes this year and more litigation pending. Your customs broker is the right owner for this, not your marketing team. Worth asking whether you’re owed a refund on the IEEPA period.
Not ignorable: returns have moved into January and gotten more expensive. Salesforce counted $181B in returned online purchases last season, 14% of all purchases, and one in seven holiday returns now lands between December 26 and 31. If your Q4 contribution margin model treats returns as a December problem, it’s wrong by a few weeks and probably by a few points.
Read the report
BFCM 2026 & Beyond: The Q5 Report →
The week-by-week cost curve. What changed on the platforms since last BFCM. And the post-Christmas plan most brands don’t have. About 20 minutes, and five weeks is still enough time to act on it.