With the ecommerce “Super Bowl” of Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) behind us, it’s tempting to start saying: “We’ll get to that in January.” Having worked both in-house as well as on the agency side, I know how tempting that can be.
But if you can muster the energy to keep going while other marketers are taking a well-deserved break, you can make a meaningful difference on your 2026 goals.
Here are 4 things you should start doing now to set yourself up for success next year:
1. Bring Budgets Back to Business As Usual (BAU)
The goal: Get back to BAU with the right budget, not just the previous one, using marginal return curves to ensure you aren't under- or over-invested in tactics.
Post-peak periods are notorious for tough performance. Since many of your loyal customers have just purchased, efficiency can look awful, creating a “sale hangover.” Looking at the marginal iROAS/iCAC of new and returning customers independently will prevent you from pulling back too far on acquisition when the hangover is likely caused by low repeat purchase volume.
During this time, teams often pull awareness and prospecting budgets down too far while keeping retargeting and retention budgets elevated. Monitoring marginal returns during this transition allows you to re-establish the right spend curve, protect profitable pockets of demand, and avoid chasing ghosts from platform-reported attribution.
2. Shift from Harvest > Growth Without Wasting Spend
After shipping cutoffs, customer urgency and intent plummets. That’s the moment marketers need to switch from harvest to sow and grow. This period is ideal for building new awareness, adding reach, and reinforcing brand memory ahead of Q1.
With good measurement, marketers can confidently shift budgets toward high-quality, future demand creation.
Treating media as awareness-first doesn’t mean “spend blindly,” it means optimizing for incremental reach and monitoring marginal efficiency. There are only two ways to make money: Get more of it from existing customers or get more new customers. Coming out of BFCM, you just maximized your existing customers; it’s time to re-focus on new customers.
To win in 2026, marketers need to focus on increasing reach rather than frequency. The best way to find new audiences is with new creative or new channels. Using Measured, brands can run tests with limited risk and definitive outcomes to help you re-enter growth mode while maintaining profitability.
3. Don’t Buy Into “Q5”
The idea of “Q5,” or the week between Christmas and New Year's, has long been popular with ad platforms, claiming low CPMs and a unique opportunity. But the reality is far less dramatic. With strong yield management systems in action, most brands don’t see a change in delivery costs. That means marketers often end up disappointed when they aggressively reallocated spend into Q5, expecting bargain efficiency.
The smarter move is to treat “Q5” like a calibration period: Maintain disciplined spend, test new audiences or creative without assuming a cost advantage, and monitor incrementality closely. You’ll protect efficiency and start the new year with a scalable strategy rather than diminishing returns and dashed expectations.
4. Plan Your 2026 Testing Roadmap Now
Post-BFCM is the perfect time to lock in your 2026 Measured Incrementality Model calibration test plan. Your Media Mix Modeling (MMM) is only as strong as the real-world lift signals you feed into it. Measured recommends running full-channel holdouts on your highest-spend platforms, typically Google and Meta, at least twice a year and ideally quarterly.
These large-scale incrementality tests provide valuable reads that keep your MMM tuned to current platform strategy, creative shifts, and audience behavior. Without regular calibration, your model is susceptible to becoming biased based on correlation (which does not prove causation), resulting in a misguided investment strategy.
Once you’ve planned your calibration tests, you should plan strategic tests that unlock 2026 growth decisions. This is where you answer business-specific questions like:
- How far can we scale Meta prospecting?
- What optimization event drives the best new customer iROAS on YouTube?
- Which CTV vendor performs best?
The output is clarity, a validated blueprint for where to invest, where to pull back, and where new growth is hiding in plain sight.
Final Thoughts
The insights you extract and the plans you put in place now are the wind in your sails through 2026 and beyond (forgive the Dad joke). This is your chance to build a smarter playbook, double down on channels with proven lift, cut inefficient spend, and evolve your media mix based on real causal measurement.
For a master class on adopting an advanced measurement strategy, download our latest guides: The Future of Media Mix Modeling and The CMO’s Guide to Causal Media Mix Modeling, and book a demo with a Measured expert today.