Holiday Prep: Data Driven Cyber Week Spend Allocations
Intro:
Cyber Week is the biggest sales moment of the year, and how you manage your daily spend allocations has a significant impact on performance.
Platforms don’t have visibility into your promotional calendar, but you do.
That advantage, paired with a variable investment levers that account for your profit margins allow you to lean in on strong results and pull back on soft ones.
The result is more revenue, more new customers and YOY record breaking growth.
At its core, this is about estimating where your diminishing return curves will be and how that relates to your profit margin based ROAS goals. To do this you need to leverage historical data and account for YOY structure and promotional calendar changes.
Here’s a step by step process to build a data driven daily spend allocation that will unlock significant gains.
Step 1: Forecast 2025 Cyber Week Performance Using Diminishing Return Curves
Build diminishing return curves for the following time periods by audience type (prospecting, retargeting, existing customer). Breaking this down by audience type allows you to account for audience mix changes YOY.
August 2024 (daily spend and attributed revenue)
Cyber Week 2024 (hourly spend and attributed revenue)
August 2025 (daily spend and attributed revenue)
Then:
Identify the multiplier between August 2024 and Cyber Week 2024.
Apply this multiplier to your August 2025 curve, by audience type, to establish forecasted returns for Cyber Week 25.
Tip: Build a seperate diminishing return curve for Cyber Week day to more effectively allocate spend by day upfront.
Step 2: Allocate spend across days
Once you’ve forecasted attributed returns for Cyber Week, the next step is to determine how spend should be distributed by day. Performance will not follow a flat line - each day behaves differently, and your allocation should reflect that.
If you built daily diminishing return curves, you already have the data to project spend efficiency at the day level. If not, you’ll need to distribute budgets across days more broadly.
A simpler starting point is to mirror last year’s day-by-day allocation percentages and adjust for historical performance and YOY promotional calendar changes.
Elevate spend on days where demand proved stronger and/or new stronger promotions exist.
Pull back on days where performance lagged or promotions have weakened.
This ensures your budget is actively weighted toward the days with the highest potential. With that said, this still requires active management and everything should be rooted in profit margin based attributed return goals.
Step 3: Partner with finance teams to establish variable budget levers
Your diminishing return curves give you a baseline for expected revenue at different investment levels. But real-world performance may exceed forecasts - and Cyber Week opportunities don’t wait.
The solution is to align with finance on variable budget thresholds tied to profit margins. That way, if campaigns outperform and exceed your profit guardrails, you can unlock incremental budget in real time to capture additional revenue before the window closes.
Conclusion:
This framework transforms historical data and real-time insights into a clear, flexible spending playbook. The result: smarter allocations, stronger margins, and the ability to scale aggressively when conditions are right.