Guide
How to boost your holiday sales before, during, and after the peak
Advertisers saw a 145% increase in sales using Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and display ads during holiday gifting, when compared to average category growth.1 Learn how to start early, use the right products, and capture the 2026 holiday opportunity.
Why the holidays matter
In 2025, worldwide online sales reached $1.5 trillion in Q4, 31.2% above the average quarterly revenue of Q1–Q3.2
The holiday season is the most critical shopping period of the year. Consumer spending surges as millions of shoppers hunt for gifts, deals, and seasonal essentials, making it the single largest revenue opportunity for businesses of every size.
This guide walks you through a three-phase plan and holiday growth strategies to capture that opportunity.
What is a three-phase holiday timeline?
The three phases of a holiday advertising timeline are: build (October), peak (November through Cyber Monday), and extend (December and beyond).
EMARKETER reports: “The holiday marketing season now begins in October, not November. According to Gallup data cited by EMARKETER, consumer spending intentions dropped from $1,007 in October 2025 to $778 in November, the largest decline Gallup has recorded. This suggests October events are capturing demand that previously concentrated in November and December. Marketers who wait until Black Friday to launch campaigns risk missing early-season shoppers entirely.”3
Here’s how to approach each phase:
- Phase 1, October: Launch your campaigns now to gather performance data before peak season. Test creative, refine targeting, and optimize bids. Confirm your product titles, images, and descriptions are accurate—well-optimized listings convert better and strengthen ad performance.
- Phase 2, November through Cyber Monday: Target niche seasonal keywords to capture high-intent holiday traffic using your best-performing creatives. Increase daily budgets by 20 to 30 percent around Black Friday and Cyber Monday and start scaling three to five days ahead of each peak event.
- Phase 3, December and beyond: Keep campaigns running through December to reach last-minute gift shoppers and post-holiday deal seekers. Re-engage visitors who browsed but didn't purchase during peak events and review new-to-brand metrics to turn seasonal buyers into repeat customers.
Eddie Latham, Co-founder, Majority AudioWe focus more on [Black Friday] as a component of Q4. So, we're looking at our marketing strategy throughout that period, not necessarily just that one single day.
What are strategies for holiday growth?
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can compete at every stage of the customer journey. A full-funnel strategy helps SMBs build awareness, inspire consideration, and drive conversions—without needing enterprise-level budgets. Here are some practical ways to connect with shoppers across the funnel.
Sponsored Products strategy
When shoppers browse for items like yours, Sponsored Products help your listings appear in shopping results and on product detail pages. These cost-per-click ads help reach shoppers when they may be close to making a purchase. Focus on products with strong detail pages to help increase conversion potential. Launch campaigns by early October to test your keywords and bids before traffic increases. Refine campaigns further with budget rules, which may save time by automatically increasing your budget by the amounts you set during specific timeframes, like holiday shopping periods. Monitor campaign performance and optimize your campaigns based on these insights every one to two weeks, especially during holiday shopping periods. You can also add video to your Sponsored Products campaigns to help shoppers explore product features and make confident purchase decisions, with no additional budget required.
Sponsored Brands strategy
Sponsored Brands helps you showcase your brand and products in prominent placements across Amazon, using engaging creative to reach shoppers as they discover and consider what to buy. During the holidays, Sponsored Brands can help your brand stand out from alternatives and give shoppers more ways to explore your products. With Sponsored Brands collections, you can showcase up to 10 related products in a single ad experience. Choose your assortment manually or use AI-powered automatic collections to curate relevant products from your catalog. Collections surface helpful details such as price, ratings, and delivery information to make products easier to evaluate, then direct shoppers to a branded landing page where they can explore the collection and discover more from your brand.
Display ads strategy
Display ads support both awareness and re-engagement during the holidays. Use interest-based and behavioral targeting to reach shoppers browsing categories relevant to your products and re-engage shoppers who viewed your detail pages but didn't purchase. During high-traffic periods, re-engaging these shoppers can help keep your products top of mind. Use product targeting to reach shoppers considering complementary or relevant products and gift ideas.
Prep your Brand Store
Your Brand Store is the only destination on Amazon that's entirely yours, with no competitor products or ads, making the holidays the perfect time to refresh it with seasonal messaging, curated gift guides, and your best deals to capture high-intent shoppers during the busiest time of year.
Use AI-powered tools to add new pages, update existing layouts, personalize content for different shopper segments, and generate seasonal event pages in seconds. A built-in performance chatbot provides traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics so you can track what's resonating with holiday shoppers and optimize your store in real time to make the most of the season.
Strategies in action
For French board game startup Savana, the holiday season is everything. “In November and December, we make about 50% of our revenue,” says co-founder Jean-Xia.4 After selling 200,000 units of their hit game Traitors Aboard worldwide, the team built their holiday strategy around multiple Amazon Ads products. “Amazon Ads was such a powerful tool, from the Sponsored Product ads to Sponsored Brands introducing the video, to now they use generative AI,” says Jean-Xia. With a new game launching ahead of the winter holidays, Savana relied on the same multi-product approach to make their next title as successful as their first.
Noé Feretti, Head of Digital, Panier des SensAmazon Ads is our primary channel for driving sales growth in Q4, accounting for 40% of our total annual sales. During that period, ad-driven sales represent around 65% of total sales, higher than during non-peak months.
How to grow holiday sales with B2B shoppers
Business shoppers on Amazon Business5 actively shop for corporate gifts, employee recognition items, and year-end supplies across different shopping events on Amazon Business, making the holiday season a key opportunity to reach business shoppers alongside home shoppers.
Why should I advertise to business buyers during the holidays?
Business purchasing does not pause for the holidays—it may even accelerate. Amazon Business helps your products reach these verified B2B customers, creating a potential new revenue stream during your busiest season. Shopping events like Prime Big Deals Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are also live on Amazon Business across multiple countries6.
What Amazon Ads features should I use to reach business buyers?
Two Amazon Business ad features help you reach B2B shoppers during the holidays:
- Bid Adjustment for Amazon Business: Increase your Sponsored Products bids by up to 900% specifically for Amazon Business placements. Start small with a 20-50% increase, run for about two weeks, then review performance and adjust.
- Exclusive Campaigns for Amazon Business: Run Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands campaigns that appear only on Amazon Business to help you reach B2B shoppers without modifying consumer-facing ads. Promote B2B-exclusive deals to stand out during the holiday season.
How early should I start B2B holiday advertising?
Start your B2B ads campaigns in October alongside your consumer campaigns. B2B shoppers begin purchasing for holiday events early—the Business Gift Guide event on Amazon Business runs from October through December, followed by Prime Big Deal Days, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the Business Savings Event (late December to next January).
Pro tip: View the holiday season as a continuous window to reach business buyers, not a series of isolated retail moments. Launch early, monitor B2B ROAS, and scale budgets into November as demand peaks.
What creative tools can I use for holiday ads?
Creating compelling holiday ads does not require a design team. Creative Studio,7 Amazon Ads central destination for AI-powered creative tools, offers everything you need to produce professional images and videos in one free hub accessible from your advertising console or aistudio.amazon.com.
Creative Agent,8 a conversational AI partner, can take you from idea to campaign-ready ads in hours. Describe your vision, and it produces concepts, storyboards, and polished videos with voiceovers and music. You can also turn still product images into dynamic video ads in minutes or generate seasonal imagery from a prompt such as “show my coffee maker on a snowy counter with holiday mugs.”
Sources:
1 Amazon internal data, BE, BR, CA, DE, ES, FR, IT, MX, NL, PL, SE, UK, US. Baseline period is 11/16/25 - 12/06/25, tentpole period is 12/07/25 - 12/27/25. Analysis includes advertisers who spent at least $1. [Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Display, all advertisers]
2 ECDB, December 2025 E-Commerce Wrap-Up: Global Revenue Hits US$499.6 Bn, China Leads in Growth, January 2026
3 eMarketer, FAQ on holiday marketing: How marketers can win in a longer, leaner season, January 2026.
4 Amazon Ads case study, Savana, June 2025.
5 Amazon Business store is available in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Japan, Australia, and India.
6 Event availability on Amazon Business store varies by store and is subject to change.
7 Creative Studio is available in the US, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom
8 Creative Agent is available in the US