The next 90 days could make or break your year. For ecommerce and retail brands, peak season is when customer intent spikes, competition heats up, and every click or scroll matters. Last week I headed to Meta’s Peak Season Accelerator to get the latest data and insights on how to thrive in this moment - even in a year where shoppers are more cautious, starting earlier, and expecting more.
Here’s what I learned, and why it matters.
Meta’s data shows UK shoppers start buying for Christmas earlier than any other market, with gift-related Reels picking up as early as October. Those who shop before November 1st spend over 40% more than those who start later. That means waiting for Black Friday to get your campaigns into full swing is a missed opportunity, early engagement fuels higher-value baskets.
Recommendation engines are now the biggest single source of product inspiration, overtaking search engines. In last year’s peak season, 93% of shoppers said they’d been inspired to buy by something they saw in media.
Over peak, 81% of Meta’s weekly users never click an ad. If you’re only optimising for click-through rate, you’re missing most of your potential customers and skewing towards older audiences who click more but may not represent your biggest growth opportunity. Meta recommends shifting to incremental attribution, measuring the conversions you’d have missed otherwise. Meta state that advertisers who’ve made this shift have seen up to 46% lifts in incremental conversions. We’ll be testing this feature ahead of Q4. In theory, this feature sounds great, but what does and doesn’t count as an incremental sale is unclear.
Peak season isn’t the time to tighten your audience so much that you only speak to people already in-market. Broader targeting expands your addressable market and fuels demand. Meta data shows campaigns using 3+ objectives (awareness, consideration, conversion) see twice the brand lift. And don’t underestimate awareness campaigns’ knock-on effects: they drive measurable gains in both Performance Max and organic search. As an agency, we’ve seen spend scale in awareness campaigns, and we expect this to grow further as we approach Q4 when CPMs are at their highest.
Creators aren’t just for awareness anymore. Partnership ads, where you run paid media from a creator’s handle, cut through noise and deliver higher engagement. Meta suggests allocating around 20% of your budget to partnership ads during peak. The sweet spot? Multiple creators working to a single big idea, the result feels like everyone’s talking about your brand at once. Influencer-fronted ad spend has grown in our accounts over the last year thanks to their exceptional click through rates, and we expect them to be a key part of account strategies during the most contested time of the year.
The biggest shift here is mindset. Peak is not just about squeezing short-term returns from your best-performing audiences, it’s about building a bigger pipeline of customers and capturing demand you didn’t know was there. The brands who will win are those who:
At Genie Goals, we’re working with clients to put this into action now, so they can head into Black Friday and beyond with momentum. If you want to turn Meta’s Full Power Peak playbook into a plan tailored to your business, now’s the time to start.
