Q4 / BFCM Playbook Series · No. 01
THREE
WINDOW
PLAN
Buy attention at half price. Discount less. Keep the customers peak season sends you.
Inside Volume One
WHAT’S INSIDE
The premise
THE SAME
IMPRESSION,
PRICED TWICE
Within Marketing Pulse puts average Meta CPMs near $7 on November 8 and near $15 on December 3. Same audience, same algorithm.
Nothing about the impression improved. The price went up because your competitors arrived.
$7
Second week
of October
$15
Week of
Cyber Monday
65%
YoY rise in Instagram CPMs on December 1
24%
More Q4 reach on the same $1M budget
“That’s where the money is. Everything after that is arithmetic.”
Margo Iyer, who audits the quarter for you
Margo is a composite, not a client. She is assembled from the finance leads and post-mortem consultants we have sat across from in years of Q4 cleanups. She asks the questions so you can watch the plan run on somebody else before you run it on yourself. Every number she works from is third-party and cited.
THREE WINDOWS,
THREE OUTCOMES
One move each, one measure each.
Twice the reach for the same money
Prospect at the annual low. Test creative while failure is cheap.
The move
Move 35% of Q4 paid spend into September and October.
Measure on list growth, not ROAS.
Sell more while discounting less
Klaviyo found peak discount rates nearly double, and repeat customers often take the deepest cuts.
The move
Segment the offer by customer type before the calendar opens.
A markdown on revenue you had already earned.
A customer base instead of a spike
The year’s largest new-customer cohort, and Shopify says most carry a lower lifetime value by default.
The move
Reacquire the cohort while CPMs fall back to baseline.
Repeat purchases grew 14% YoY at BFCM 2025 against 9% for new buyers.
Get Volume One
ALL THREE
WINDOWS, IN
ONE VOLUME
The Build · Sept 1 – Oct 25
The Harvest · Oct 26 – Nov 30
The Settlement · Dec 1 – Feb 15
No sales call attached. Unsubscribe in one click.
The reach model, shown
A $1M Q4 budget run both ways, at blended CPMs of $7 / $15 / $8.
A reach model, not a revenue forecast.
Also inside
The channel nobody is bidding for. Retail traffic from AI tools, up 693% YoY.
The discount file. Where peak markdown dollars actually land.
Cordwell, two years running. One brand’s numbers, before and after.
The Six Questions. A scored self-audit you can run alone.
6,000+
Brands grown
100+
Industry awards
12+
Years running
The only date that matters
WINDOW ONE
OPENS
SEPTEMBER 1
Every week you wait is a week bought at Window Two prices.
Takes about thirty seconds.