Meta Ads: Preparing for Peak Season

But, for us, this signals the start of peak shopping season. Peak season refers to a time of year with heightened demand and increased consumer spending during key seasonal periods, like Christmas. 

These campaigns are strategically launched to build brand awareness and drive conversions during times of high consumer spending, and require planning, creative, and strategy that help brands stand out from the competition. 

Following a Meta Ad’s webinar on preparing for Peak Season, we’re sharing key market indicators and recommendations on how brands can make the most of their paid ads over peak season. 

Ipsos (March 2025) reports a drop in global consumer confidence, echoing the UN’s Trade and Development insights, highlighting how uncertainty is reshaping global economic prospects. People and businesses are taking into consideration how and where they spend due to rising living costs, inflation, and ongoing global uncertainty.  For consumers, this might look like lower budgets during peak periods, prioritising essentials, and delaying non-urgent purchases.  On the other hand,  increased costs might mean that businesses are being more cautious with their budgets and marketing spend during traditional peak periods – often reducing spend or moving budget to safer, more proven channels for their product.

Rather than spreading spending widely, brands might begin concentrating investment on the platforms that deliver the highest ROI. Social media has now overtaken search as the largest global channel for ad spend, driven by its ability to combine reach, targeting, and commerce functionality.

As consumer discovery habits shift, brands must evolve with them, and as social media advertising is projected to climb further, platforms like Meta are helping businesses maximise performance and turn cautious consumer activity into measurable results.

Despite the rocky market conditions, when we look at consumer spending in 2024, the peak shopping window continued to grow, with 20% of shopping being done before November. Planning early means you can take advantage of a bigger chunk of consumer spending.

Consumer behaviour online continues to change, and recommendation engines such as Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify are becoming increasingly popular. There are so many communities or ‘sides of TikTok’ you can be on, and product recommendations are wedged in between with ads and videos from influencers within that space. Because of this, search is dwindling. 

Meta shared that there has been an increase in posts related to Black Friday, but the trends in search for this have been declining YoY. People now expect products to fall into their laps, rather than spending the time in their browser looking for the right products for themselves or others. 

Recommendation engines are getting better, and ad models are improving, so it’s no surprise that Meta has grown from position 4 to position 1 for product discovery over peak shopping season. It’s responding to consumer behaviour by aiming to predict what a user is looking for, and serving it to them on their feed.

Meta has created an opportunity score from 0-100, which evaluates how optimised your campaigns, ad sets, and ads are. Alongside this will be a set of recommendations that are created using three key principles. 

Proven – backed by an experiment that shows it improves results

Personalised – tailored to your business profile and campaign characteristics

Prioritised – ranked based on estimated performance impact, where it is responsively updated near real time throughout the campaign. 

This score will be available before campaign setup, during, and after, so you can monitor effects on your campaign score.

When planning a campaign for peak shopping season, the focus should be on aligning the campaign to take advantage of the seasonal dynamics. Here’s an overview of Meta’s recommendations to keep your peak in line with these seasonal shifts.

If you haven’t already looked at your campaigns ahead of peak season, now is the time to get it done. Meta recommends adopting the simplest account structure possible, as these provide more opportunities to reach customers with a 28% lower cost per purchase for ad sets. 

Campaigns are only as effective as the data you provide, and some tools can do this for you. Sharing high-quality data on the events important to your business goals through tools such as Conversions API or Lightspeed will feed more data and insights to keep campaigns optimised.

Many of the most engaging ad types, like carousel ads, collection ads, dynamic product ads, and even shoppable Reels or TikToks, pull products directly from these catalogues.

This means the ads have increased personalisation and are scalable without needing manual creative updates.

Your catalogue match rate should ideally be above 90%, but no lower than 75%. A high percentage shows that the products users are interacting with on your website are the same ones that are available in your catalogue.

Using AI-powered Advantage+ won’t just mean a reduction in the time you spend on manual optimisation, but also access to new value tools which help align AI to what matters most throughout your campaign, whether that’s increased ROAS or maximising conversions. 

Meta Story builder is a new strategy for creating ad campaigns by combining the ad sequencing and target frequency features within Meta Ads Manager. Brands can tell longer stories in multiple parts by delivering a series of ads to the same audience with a specified order. You can also pre-define the frequency to maximise ad recall and build a complementary brand visual across Meta’s platforms. 

Work on making some reels that follow the creative guidance: a hook, audio effects, editing techniques, text overlays, and real people. Reels that follow the creative advice have an increased conversion rate and lower CPA’s. 

Linking this back to Peak Season 2024: ad sets with 9:16 videos and audio assets saw higher conversion rates and lower CPAs than ad sets without. This trend was consistent across regions.

With the increase in search on apps such as TikTok, it’s not a surprise that creators have a big influence on ads and paid strategies. They consistently improve on results across both performance and brand, but they need to be relevant to your brand and the right demographic for what you want to deliver. 

Don’t wait until you’re too busy in the excitement of Christmas to start thinking about your post-season campaigns. Yes, the peak season gets earlier and earlier every year, but there are still those lapsed and late shoppers you can target.

Benefit from your previous work and learnings to pivot quickly during the fast-paced peak season to meet new demands as they arise.  You can consider new creative formats like highlighting your promotions and reminder ads to showcase sales. Meta shared some great stats on different ad types, as seen below. 

There are also different catalogue creatives you can put to work to diversify your ad formats and keep your brand and products in consumers’ minds over the holiday period. You could try adding catalogue images to Advantage+ Creative to let AI show people relevant products, use creative overlays to show discounted rates, use video, or even a stock checker to help drive in-store sales, particularly near the shipping cut-off times. 

This marks the start of Meta’s omnichannel ads, guiding users not just to your website or checkout, but straight into your physical locations, with intelligent prompts like “in stock nearby” or even discount nudges.

When running campaigns on Meta, the system goes through a learning period when you make changes, where the algorithm is re-optimising. During this, it’s figuring out who to show ads to, how to bid, and what placements perform best. 

If you keep editing your campaigns, you will force the system to start over and delay reaching peak performance. This means the results will be less stable and your delivery will be inconsistent. Get this sorted from the get-go to avoid this.

At this point, you will know what’s working and what isn’t – so use this to your advantage to push budget in those areas to capitalise on the final stint of peak season. With the lower CPA’s, there will be a strong environment to capture last-minute shoppers when heading into the new year. 

Refresh your creative to speak to those ‘after the moment’ shopping motivations. Move from gifting others to gifting yourself in preparation for the New Year. Turn your copy into New Year’s resolutions, encourage trying new things, or getting that discount before going into the New Year. 

Don’t underestimate the power of Q5, and take advantage of the dip in CPMs by running campaigns after the shipping cutoff. You can continue peak season momentum into the January sales! 

Value optimisation in Q5 is where advertisers have seen the most gains.

Success in peak season doesn’t come down to last-minute tweaks; it’s built in advance. By reviewing your current campaigns and optimising the foundations, aligning with both clients and teams on a shared definition of success, and preparing through thoughtful testing, you’ll be ready to hit the festive season with confidence. A clear strategy today means stronger performance tomorrow.