Guide

How to pace ad spend around holidays

A pacing baseline built on a flat daily average breaks twice a year, reliably: around the big consumer holidays, and around whatever dates your own audience goes quiet. Neither is actually drift — it's the calendar doing what it does every year — but a pacing system that doesn't know that will flag it as a problem anyway, right on schedule.

Running seven channels by hand for a year taught a simple lesson: the channels that spiked on Black Friday and the channels that went dark the week of Christmas were almost never the same ones. Holiday-aware pacing means knowing which is which, for each channel, before the date arrives — not reacting to the alert after it fires.

The steps

1. 1

   Build a holiday calendar per channel

   List the dates that actually move spend for each channel — not a generic holiday list. Retail-facing Meta and Google Shopping campaigns care about Black Friday and Cyber Monday; B2B-focused LinkedIn and search campaigns often care more about the quiet stretch from mid-December through New Year's.

2. 2

   Classify each date as a spike or a lull

   A holiday doesn't always mean more spend — plenty mean less. A retail account can run 2-3x its normal daily budget on Black Friday weekend, while a B2B account's LinkedIn spend can drop to near zero the same week everyone's buying gifts. Tag each date on each channel accordingly.

3. 3

   Adjust the daily floor for the window, not the month

   A holiday is usually a handful of days, not a reason to rebuild the whole month's pacing baseline. Set a specific daily floor for the holiday window, then let the rest of the month pace against its normal cadence-aware baseline.

4. 4

   Use last year's actuals as the input

   Pull what the channel actually spent on the same dates last year rather than guessing a percentage lift or cut. A channel that spent 2.4x its normal daily rate on Black Friday last year is a far better forecast than an assumed "holidays spike spend" rule of thumb.

5. 5

   Tell the trip-wire about the holiday in advance

   A 10% overspend trip-wire that doesn't know Black Friday is coming will fire every year on the same date. Feed the holiday-adjusted expectation into the pacing check so a normal, planned spike doesn't get treated the same as an unplanned one.

6. 6

   Re-baseline the day after

   Once the holiday window closes, snap the expected daily pace back to the channel's normal cadence-aware baseline immediately. Carrying a holiday adjustment forward even a few extra days quietly misreads every day after it.

Frequently asked questions