How to Prepare Your Budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Have you started preparing for Cyber Week sales? You need to know this. We looked across a whole bunch of LiftLab customers and found a recurring theme: Many brands overfund Cyber Monday at the cost of properly funding Black Friday. It’s because, on the consumer side, there are a lot of people in the market on Black Friday who may not go to the store and shop online instead. But, on the media side of the equation, the same dynamics are exacerbated during those weekends. On those days, it’s crucial to pay close attention to media prices. We are all aware that ad platforms are also going to have a big day that day, and their prices are likely to go up due to increased competition. But it’s not enough to know this directionally. You need to quantify these changes to make informed budgeting decisions. Preparing now is important so that you can ensure you’ve locked in the needed budget with your finance team to fund the forecasts you’re targeting. So, as we’re talking to our customers about their Cyber Week preparations, we’re asking them to approach this problem in 2 distinct ways: 1. Revisit your Cyber Week spend from the prior year and use that as a scenario to plan and analyze. Did you allocate correctly? Should you migrate some spend from Cyber Monday to Black Friday? 2. Consider a more recent period where current spend levels, CPMs, and CPCs are present. Understand that media economics and combine that knowledge with the promo effect from the previous Cyber Week. Doing so will give you 2 views on the data. While they hopefully align reasonably with one another, it may offer an additional signal regarding where you want to land for the upcoming Cyber Week.