You think talking about Christmas campaigns in August is too early? Well, we start preparing for ours in January, and in this article we’ll tell you why.
Two reasons. January is when we review the season that’s just finished, while the numbers are fresh and everyone still remembers what happened. And January is when the budget for next Christmas starts accumulating.
Everything that follows is built on our own campaign data: five consecutive festive periods, November through January, run for UK retail clients and compared season against season.
A note on the figures. These are aggregates from live client campaigns, not a controlled study, and they’re shaped by budget and campaign decisions as well as auction dynamics. We’ve anonymised the accounts and shown movement rather than actual cost, partly because what a business pays per click is commercially sensitive, and partly because indexed change is more useful: our clients operate in different categories at very different price points, so their absolute CPCs have nothing to say to each other. Treat all of it as a prompt to interrogate your own numbers, not as a universal benchmark.
Here are five strategies that came out of it.
1. PPC: manage the whole season
Smarter Ecommerce’s market observer, tracking around €650m of European ad spend, recorded 13% year-on-year Shopping CPC inflation in Q4 2025 before the market cooled through 2026. Yes, Christmas is getting more expensive to advertise into, year on year, and we notice this too. So, what can you do to make sure you get the most out of your PPC campaigns?
Budgeting is in your data
You need to check the trend against your own account, not just the market. Market’s averages won’t necessary work out for you. We see across our retail base, where CPC has been rising over the last four festive seasons, that the rise doesn’t land evenly. As an example, one account of ours saw December CPC fall 34% below its autumn baseline, another saw it run 31% above. So don’t budget on the general trend alone. Run a year-over-year comparison on your own account before you set spend and plan accordingly.
Impressions vs click-through-rate
Impressions can rise dramatically during this period as browsers and comparison-shoppers pile in. We have seen a rise up to 139% on impressions in one pf our accounts, for example. More impressions at a lower click-through rate means broad and phrase match are pulling in a wider spread of search terms, many of which were never going to convert, and every click on one of those is budget wasted. That’s why we review search terms twice a week rather than monthly at December volumes, so we catch and exclude that drift before it’s eaten much of the budget, build negative lists consistently from season to season and tighten match types ahead of the peak.
Track cost per conversion, not just CPC
When CPC rises, your cost per sale rises too. It’s natural. What you need to monitor is whether they rise in parallel, or your CPA is rising faster than your CPC. If it’s the latter, you need to look into it.
Across our own festive campaigns, comparing the 2023–24 and 2025–26 Christmas periods, CPC rose 60% and cost per conversion rose a bit slower, 58%. Our festive conversion rate still sits at 6.7%, more than twice the 2026 ecommerce average. We hold that lead by optimising the conversion path and tightening targeting before the season starts, not once it’s underway, which is what keeps a small dip from turning into a bigger one. Do the same on your own account and a rising CPC costs you less at the point of sale than it otherwise would.
Want a clearer read on where your own account stands before you commit spend? That’s what our paid media audit is for.
2. Christmas promotions in Google Merchant Center, delivered via Shopping campaigns
Beyond general Shopping and PMax campaigns, we run dedicated Christmas promotions through Google Merchant Center: sale pricing, promotional badging and merchant promotions surfaced directly on Shopping listings, rather than relying on ad copy alone to signal the offer.
Across the accounts where we’ve run this, festive Merchant Center promotions convert 0.9–3.6% higher than standard Shopping campaigns over the same period, with some accounts seeing outliers up to 4.1%.
The mechanism is straightforward. A promotion badge or strike-through price on a Shopping listing gives a browser a reason to click yours over a competitor’s at the exact moment they’re comparing prices, which is most of what December Shopping traffic is doing. It doesn’t fix a weak feed or a bad margin call, but layered on top of the feed discipline in strategy one, pruning underperforming SKUs and labelling genuine festive demand, it’s one of the highest-leverage, lowest-effort additions to a festive Shopping campaign. It’s set up once in Merchant Center and runs across the whole promotional window without needing daily management.
3. Email: warm the list before you sell to it
Paid search and Shopping do the work of getting a new customer to look. Email marketing does the work of getting an existing one to buy again, and it’s underused in most festive plans until the last two weeks of the season, by which point the inbox is already full of everyone else’s Christmas offers too.
The approach we’d recommend is to segment the list based on past Christmas behaviour, not just recency. Customers who bought a festive gift last year, customers who browsed but didn’t buy, and customers with no prior December activity are three different audiences with three different jobs to do. The first two are warmer than a cold subscriber and should be treated that way from the first send.
Ahead of the peak, a short warm-up sequence, something as simple as a “the best Christmas deals are coming” teaser to the list before the offers go live, sets expectation and gets subscribers checking the inbox rather than scrolling past a cold-open discount email in week one of the campaign. From there the sequence can follow the same logic as the PPC plan: build toward the peak, hold through December, and have a clear re-engagement or win-back angle ready for January rather than going quiet once the 25th passes.
Segmentation earns its keep in the conversion numbers. Across the accounts where we’ve matched a segment to the right offer, past Christmas buyers, browsers who didn’t convert, and cold subscribers each getting a different message, segmented sends convert 2–4% higher than a general Christmas campaign sent to the full list.
4. Paid social Christmas campaigns
Search and Shopping catch people actively looking. Paid social catches them before they’ve started, which matters for a season where a large share of December traffic is comparison and gift research rather than committed buying (see strategy one). A Meta/Instagram festive push, carousel or video creative built around gift guides, delivery deadlines or a specific promotion, extends reach to that earlier-stage audience and can feed retargeting audiences back into Search and Shopping rather than competing with them.
The same seasonal discipline applies here as to PPC. We build and test creative in November rather than during the peak, plan spend across the same Black Friday to January window rather than stopping at Christmas Day, and treat cost per sale, not cost per click or cost per follow, as the number that decides whether the channel earned its budget
5. Landing page and checkout CRO for the festive period
None of the first four strategies matter if the page a customer lands on isn’t up to the job. Whatever’s driving the click, PPC, Shopping, email or paid social, it hands the customer off to a landing page, and that page has to close the sale.
That means checking the basics are genuinely in place before the peak, not assuming they are: the offer is stated clearly, the call to action is prominent and not competing with anything else on the page, the questions a festive buyer actually has (delivery cut-off dates, gift options, returns over the holidays) are answered without them having to hunt, and checkout works without a hitch. That last point matters more at Christmas than any other time of year: a checkout that’s fine at normal traffic can slow down, or fall over completely, under December volumes, and we test for that and optimise landing pages for conversion ahead of the peak.
What this means for your Christmas planning
Five festive seasons of data say the same thing from several directions. Christmas search is getting steadily more expensive, the received wisdom about when and where that lands is unreliable, and the cost of a sale is rising faster than the cost of a click. None of that is a reason to spend less on Christmas. It’s a reason to spend deliberately, across paid search, Shopping, email, paid social and the landing pages they all send traffic to, funding the whole season rather than the fortnight before Christmas.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your Q4 plan, or on what last Christmas actually cost you, get in touch. We work with online retailers on everything from ecommerce development through to festive campaign strategy, and we’ll start with your data rather than a template.
Energy Cell is a Lincoln-based integrated marketing agency and a certified Google Partner. This analysis draws on accounts under our management across five festive periods, from November 2021 to January 2026. Client data has been anonymised and reported as indexed change rather than absolute spend.
Ready to unwrap your potential? Get in touch today.
Sources cited
Ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks (2.8% Search, 1.4% Shopping, 2026): Store Growers and COREPPC
Smarter Ecommerce, Google Ads CPC Benchmarks (market observer), last updated 27 July 2026:
