The holiday season creates one of the strangest environments for paid advertising. If you are running Facebook or Instagram ads from mid November through early January, you have probably already noticed the pattern: everything feels off. Costs bounce around, results swing up and down, and nothing behaves the way it did a week earlier.
In my coaching call, I broke down exactly why this happens and what to do about it so you do not panic, pause your ads, or break a system that was working perfectly.
Here is the full breakdown of my Holiday Ad Performance Rules.
Holidays Create Artificially Weird Ad Weeks
Anytime a major American holiday hits – Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Easter – the week before and the week after turn into unpredictable weeks on the ad platforms. People change their routines, travel, check their phones less, engage differently, and spend money differently.
This does not mean your ads suddenly stopped working.
It means the environment temporarily changed.
So here is the rule:
If your ad was working before the holiday, do not touch it during the holiday week. Let it ride.
Do not shut it off
Do not tweak it
Do not panic because the numbers dipped
Your system did not break – the calendar did.
Higher Costs Are Normal in November and December
From early November to late December:
Big national brands spend massive holiday budgets
New advertisers enter the market for Black Friday and Christmas sales
Competition surges
CPMs go up across every industry
This creates a predictable pattern:
your cost per acquisition will be higher during these months.
It is not your ad.
It is not your creative.
It is not your targeting.
It is the ad marketplace itself.
If your ad was profitable before this season, it will stabilize again after the holiday wave passes.
Do Not Make Emotional Decisions With Your Ad Account
Holiday behavior tricks a lot of business owners into thinking they need to fix something. But if you start pausing ads, restarting them, changing budgets, or replacing creatives during a holiday dip, you will force your ad account back into the learning phase – and now it takes even longer to stabilize.
The best strategy is patience.
Let your ads run.
Let the algorithm finish the holiday chaos.
Evaluate performance only after the season resets.
Think big picture, not holiday by holiday.
Your System Matters More Than the Season
If you have already built a proper advertising system – tracking, targeting, optimized creatives, and a clear cost per acquisition – then holidays do not change the fundamentals. Results temporarily wobble, but your system still works.
The real danger is not the holidays.
The real danger is reacting impulsively and disrupting the system that was already winning.
Stay consistent, stay disciplined, and let the strategy carry you through the holiday noise.
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