The Peak Season Playbook 2026

What ecommerce and omnichannel advertisers actually did through the 2025 peak season, and how to plan your 2026 marketing around it.

The received wisdom says Black Friday compresses returns. Everyone piles into the same auction, costs climb and margins get squeezed. Our 2025 cohort shows the opposite. Media did get more expensive, from a €6.5 to an €8.8 median CPM, yet peak-week shoppers converted at far higher rates, so those pricier impressions still turned into the cheapest orders of the season. The advertisers who leaned in were rewarded, as long as they could see which channels actually earned the sale. That is exactly what we built Billy Grace to show you.