Cyber Week marketing budget allocation often overfunds Cyber Monday at Black Friday’s expense. This matters because ad platforms raise prices on both days, and without quantifying that shift, brands default to last year’s split. Without a deliberate plan, a brand locks in the same imbalance yearly and splits revenue unevenly. This video explains two ways to plan the split: use last year’s data, or blend recent economics with prior promotional effects.
Why Cyber Week Budget Allocation Often Shortchanges Black Friday
Cyber Week budget allocation often shortchanges Black Friday, because brands sandbag their budget toward Cyber Monday without noticing how much online shopping, and how much ad platform competition, is already happening the day before. In this video, John Wallace, CEO of LiftLab, shares a pattern LiftLab has observed across many customers, not universally, but often enough to matter: brands tend to overfund Cyber Monday relative to Black Friday, even though plenty of Black Friday shopping happens online rather than in stores.
The media dynamics that drive this are the same forces at work on both days, just intensified: every ad platform is having a big day too, and heavier competition for placements pushes prices up. Wallace argues brands need to move past a directional sense of that price pressure and actually quantify it. He recommends preparing a Cyber Week plan two ways: revisit last year’s allocation and ask whether spend should shift from Cyber Monday toward Black Friday, and separately, build a fresh scenario using more current media economics, like September’s CPCs and CPMs and any new channels that weren’t available last year, blended with the prior year’s promotional effects. Doing both, and locking in the resulting number with finance ahead of time, is what actually protects the quarter’s forecast.
In this video, you’ll learn:
Why many brands struggle with inefficient budget allocation during peak shopping events
How to identify if you are overfunding specific high-traffic days like Cyber Monday
The impact of increased ad platform competition on your media pricing and costs
Two distinct, data-driven approaches to plan your annual Cyber Week marketing budget
How to align your marketing forecast with finance team requirements for better execution
TIME STAMPFull Video Transcript: Cyber Week Budget Allocation Explained
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LiftLab CEO John Wallace explains why brands often overfund Cyber Monday at Black Friday’s expense, and two ways to plan a better split.
[0:00 – 0:34] Preparing for Cyber Week
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, let’s call it Cyber Week, are right around the corner, and we have customers asking us, and we’re asking customers, are you prepared for this? What are you going to do differently? It is a really important question; some brands can make or break their quarter with good performance on Cyber Monday. We have fortunately been able to look across a whole bunch of LiftLab customers, and not 100% of the time, but one theme that we’ve seen emerge is that there has sometimes been evidence that they have overfunded Cyber Monday at the cost of properly funding Black Friday.
[0:34 – 1:26] Analyzing Media and Consumer Dynamics
What would lead to that conclusion? It would be, on the consumer side, there’s a lot of people in market on Black Friday that may not go to the store; they may shop online. But on the media side of the equation, it’s the same dynamics, just exacerbated on those weekends and those days. We need to pay attention to the price of the media, and we know that all the ad platforms are also going to have a big day that day, and so they’re going to make a lot of money, and their prices tend to go up with that much competition. We all know this, so we need to know it more than directionally, we need to quantify it. That’s one of the dynamics that contributed to that potential finding; people had kind of sandbagged their budget, as they should, towards Cyber Monday. You need to make hay while the sun shines, as they say, but the proportion of it becomes the question. How do we allocate? We want to see each of those big shopping days funded appropriately and not overfunded; we want to get as much as we can out of our budget.
[1:26 – 2:20] Strategic Planning for Budget Allocation
Preparing now is important, so that you can make sure you’ve locked in with your finance team the proper amount of budget to fund the forecast that they’re targeting. We’re encouraging customers to look at their Cyber Week scenarios for the upcoming year two ways. Clearly, the first one would be, as I mentioned before, looking at last year and saying, did I allocate correctly, in my example, should I migrate some spend out of Cyber Monday into Black Friday coming up? So using that exact same data, the alternative is to take the media economics from something much more recent, maybe something in September, those spend levels, those CPCs, those CPMs, maybe you even have some new channels that weren’t present last year, and infuse that with the promo effects from the prior Cyber Week. You get to blend two dynamics into one scenario, and that’s a great complement to just basing everything off of last year.
Key Lessons: Planning a Balanced Cyber Week Budget Allocation
Budgeting strategy: Evaluate your previous year’s performance to determine if shifting spend from Cyber Monday to Black Friday improves overall return.
Economic analysis: Integrate current campaign data, such as recent CPC and CPM trends, to create a more realistic scenario for upcoming promotional periods.
Financial alignment: Proactively prepare your data and rationale to secure the necessary funding from finance stakeholders well before the shopping rush begins.
Performance optimization: Focus on quantifying media dynamics rather than relying on general assumptions to maximize your brand’s reach during high-competition days.
