Q5 ad planning has a timing problem. The cheap window opens when half the industry is out of office, and the creative has to be finished weeks before that. October sounds early to talk about January. It’s about right.
Q5 isn’t a real quarter. It’s a nickname for the weeks after holiday shopping ends, roughly late December through January, when advertiser demand drops and ad costs often follow. Is it worth building a plan around? Sometimes. Below is what the data says, where games may behave differently, and what has to happen between now and Christmas for a team to be ready.
Paid social gets more expensive through the fall. Retailers and ecommerce brands pile into the same auctions ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday; more bidders push prices up, and the pressure peaks in December. When the shopping ends, many of those advertisers pause or cut back.
One agency’s recent report on Meta CPMs, built from its own client accounts, fits the story. It showed CPMs up 13% from August to September and called that the early stage of the Q4 squeeze. Its January numbers showed CPMs falling across most campaigns after the holiday surge. By February they were climbing again as competition came back.
Two cautions. That’s one agency’s accounts, heavy on retail categories, so it points a direction and settles nothing. And look at the shape: January was cheap, February wasn’t. If your window is real, it’s measured in weeks. Industry write-ups from past years have put the soft stretch anywhere from mid-December to the end of January, which tells you the edges move.
Maybe. Nobody should promise you that.
The case for yes is simple. Game advertisers bid in the same auctions as retailers, so when retail pressure eases, prices can ease for everybody. There’s also a common assumption that installs jump after Christmas, as people unwrap new phones and tablets and start loading apps. It sounds right. Check it against your own install curve before leaning on it.
The case for no depends on your vertical. Sportsbook and other real-money categories run on the football calendar. The 2026-27 NFL regular season ends January 9 and 10, the playoffs start with Wild Card weekend on January 16 to 18 and finish with the conference championships on January 31, and the Super Bowl is February 14. College football adds its playoff quarterfinals on December 30 and January 1, semifinals on January 14 and 15, and the national championship on January 25. That’s a heavy football stretch sitting right on top of the weeks retail goes quiet, so costs in those categories can hold or rise just as your friends in ecommerce are celebrating cheap CPMs. Two accounts in the same genre can show opposite patterns, depending on audience, geography, and what else they have running.
So who’s right? Your account history, and nothing we can offer comes close.
Pull last year’s numbers for mid-November through the end of February, week by week. Look at CPM, cost per install or cost per result, volume, and the quality of the players those installs brought, using whatever retention window you trust. Put December next to January and ask two questions. Did costs fall? Did quality hold?
The second question carries the weight. An install that costs less is no bargain if those players are gone by day 30. Cheap weeks reward patience on the read as much as on the buy.
If you don’t have a year of history, because the account is new or the game launched recently, borrow the direction from channel-level data and keep the money modest. A plan built on a guess should be small enough to be wrong.
Meta’s pattern doesn’t tell you much about TikTok, Google, or Apple Search Ads. Social and video channels tend to follow auction pressure from advertisers like retailers, so they’re the likeliest to soften when those advertisers pause. Search-based channels run on intent, and the cost of a keyword depends on who else wants it that month. A competitor launching a new game in January can move your numbers more than the holiday calendar does.
Public benchmarks for all this are thin. Most seasonal numbers come from agencies and ad tech vendors measuring their own clients, which is useful and also skewed toward whoever they work with. The platforms don’t publish seasonal cost curves by genre. Treat any single chart, including the one above, as one data point. Your weekly numbers from last year are worth more than any of them.
The media side of Q5 ad planning is a spreadsheet and a decision. The creative side is a calendar fight.
Teams slow down in the last two weeks of December. Approvals stall, vendors close, people travel. Whatever runs in January has to be finished before all that, which means it’s produced in November, while the Black Friday work is also in motion. Meanwhile, the ads that carried Q4 will be worn down by January, with the same people seeing them over and over. Cheap impressions on tired ads buy very little. Cheap impressions on something new buy a lot more.
A rough calendar:
Did we leave something out? Probably. Every team has a different holiday freeze. The trick is to work backward from your last working day, not forward from the day costs drop.
A January brief for Q5 ad planning stays short and specific. Name the two or three concepts you want live by the end of December. Ask for extra versions of each one, with different first seconds and captions, so you can swap in something new around the middle of the month when the first wave starts to wear. Flag the sizes and placements you’ll need before the studio closes, since a missing aspect ratio on December 23 is a bad surprise.
Then write down what you’ll judge success on, using the retention window you trust. That way, the mid-January read is a look at numbers, not a debate about what they were supposed to mean.
Q4 budgets tend to get spent, because spending feels like momentum and unspent money invites questions. Deciding in October how much to carry into January is a conversation worth having before the pressure starts.
We won’t give you a percentage. It depends on what your own history showed, how confident you are in the creative, and how much risk your stakeholders can stomach. A rule that holds up: carry only as much as your data supports, and ramp in steps. Big overnight budget jumps can disrupt delivery on some platforms, so a measured climb over several days beats a switch flipped on the first of the year.
Q5 ad planning involves people who never touch the ads. Budget rules at many companies reward spending the year’s money by December and make carrying it over hard. If a client or a finance team has to approve the carryover, the conversation has to start now.
Bring last year’s numbers, the range of outcomes you expect, and the smaller bet you’re proposing. A reversible chunk set aside for January is an easier yes than a request to trust the dip.
Here’s a use for Q5 ad planning that has nothing to do with saving money. When impressions cost less, it costs less to try a risky idea.
Every team has a pile of concepts that got cut in Q4 for being too odd, too slow, or too far from what already works. Dust it off. A new character, a format you’ve never run, a hook that feels a little wrong. If it flops in January, the tuition was cheap. If it works, you walk into spring with something nobody else in the feed has.
Keep that list running from October so it’s ready when the window opens. What’s on yours?
It happens. Costs might hold, or the dip might land in a different week than you planned. Build the plan so that doesn’t sink you.
New creative is useful in any month. The only real bet in the whole plan is the budget you carry over, so keep that part modest and easy to reverse. If January looks cheap, lean in. If it doesn’t, you still have fresh ads, a healthier account, and one less scramble on the twenty-second of December.
So here’s the question to take into your next planning meeting. If the next six weeks handed you a stretch of cheap impressions, what would you have ready to run?
If your January creative isn’t in production by early December, it probably won’t be ready when the window opens. Reach out and let’s work Q5 ad planning backward from your calendar.
