How Much Can You Afford to Pay for a Holiday Customer?

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53 days until Black Friday. Before you decide on a discount or ad budget, work out what a new customer might cost you during the sale.

Today begins a two-part series. In Part 1, we use your own ad and order data to forecast a holiday CAC range. In Part 2, we’ll use that range to work out the order value your offer needs to produce.

Today: Forecast your holiday CAC, find products Google has stopped showing, borrow a 2,900-hour ad idea and check whether “shipped” orders have reached the carrier.

Holiday season is around the corner. Before setting a discount or ad budget, you need a realistic range for what it may cost to acquire a new customer.

So we’re doing a two-part series to help you plan your holiday offer using your own numbers.

In Part 1, we’ll estimate what a new customer could cost during the holiday sale.

In Part 2, we’ll use that CAC range to calculate the average order value needed to reach your target profit. Then we’ll build the offer around it.

Ad costs often rise during the holidays. Yet shoppers may also be more ready to buy. Both can happen at once.

In Billy Grace’s analysis of Black Friday week 2025, median ad prices were about 36% higher than the September and October baseline, while its measured cost per order was about 18% lower. Cost per order is not the same as new-customer CAC, but the result shows why an increase in ad prices cannot be treated as an equal increase in acquisition cost.

To forecast your own CAC, follow the money through four steps: what you pay to show the ad, how many people click, how many clicks become orders, and how many of those orders come from first-time buyers.

New-customer CAC = ad spend ÷ new customers acquired

In the example above, $26 buys 1,000 impressions. Those produce 22 clicks, about 1.1 orders and 0.825 new customers. That puts the estimated new-customer CAC at $31.52.

Start with your most recent four representative weeks. Pull your CPM (the cost of 1,000 impressions), link click-through rate, purchase rate among paid clicks and percentage of paid orders from new customers.

Next, compare the weeks before last year’s holiday sale with the sale itself. How much did each of those four numbers change? Apply those changes to your current numbers to form your expected case.

For example, imagine a store currently pays a $20 CPM, gets a 2% link click-through rate and converts 4% of paid clicks. Three-quarters of its paid orders come from new buyers. If last year’s sale brought a 30% higher CPM, 10% higher click-through rate and 25% higher purchase rate, its expected holiday inputs become $26 CPM, 2.2% click-through rate, 5% purchase rate and 75% new-buyer share. That produces the $32 CAC shown above.

Use last year’s offer as context too. A much deeper discount this year may lift conversion, but you cannot assume the same lift from a weaker offer.

Now run two more versions. For the strong case, use better results you have actually seen in comparable weeks. For the weak case, use less favorable results, especially from weeks when you spent close to this year’s planned budget. Higher spend can change your acquisition cost.

This illustrative store would plan around $32, while knowing CAC could land closer to $24 or $48. The range gives Part 2 something useful to work with: an expected cost and a tougher case the offer should be tested against.

Update the forecast when the sale starts. Common Thread Collective published a brand-specific CAC forecast that missed by 17%, partly because actual spend was 20% below plan. Your forecast is a planning tool; the first days of real data should sharpen it.

Bring the expected and weak CAC numbers to Part 2. We’ll use them to calculate the order value your holiday offer must produce to cover acquisition costs and deliver your target profit.

Sources: Billy Grace’s 2025 findings, reported by PPC Land; Common Thread Collective’s CAC forecasting study.

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A product can be live on your store but disapproved in Google Merchant Center. Disapproved products stop appearing across Google, so check this before assuming a listing has simply lost demand.

In Google Merchant Center, go to Products & store → Products → Needs attention. Look under All products that need attention and filter by Disapproved. A warning is different: that product may still appear.

If you want the full list, turn off Prioritized fixes, which can hide lower-impact issues.

Choose a product and select Fix under Status. Check what Google flagged. Common causes include a price or availability mismatch, a broken product-page link, or an image issue.

Start with a product you actively promote or expect to sell this season.

Correct the issue on your product page or in the product data you send to Google. Make sure both show the same price, availability and variant. Then use Request website check or Request review if Merchant Center offers that option.

Check Needs attention again to confirm the disapproval has cleared. A review can take up to seven business days; submitting a fix does not make the product visible immediately.

Source: Google Merchant Center Help

ChatGPT adds virtual try-on to shopping results

Shoppers can now upload a photo to see an AI-generated preview of clothing or accessories from a product listing. Brands should check that product imagery and descriptions are accurate; the preview is not a fit guarantee.

Shopify’s default AI shopping setting can add future channels

Shopify’s “Allow Shopify to manage for me” setting makes products available to supported AI channels and automatically enrolls stores in future ones. Check Sales channels → Agentic if you want to choose channels or checkout behavior yourself.

FTC sues Lens.com over advertised prices that rise at checkout

The FTC alleges Lens.com advertised low prices in search ads, then added mandatory “Taxes & fees” late in checkout, often doubling the bill. The case is undecided, but for brands scaling paid traffic, hidden fees are an enforcement risk, not just checkout friction. Compare ad prices with the full checkout cost, including mandatory charges and subscription terms.

A brand can make 50 ads and still never answer the question that moves a buyer forward. If every ad jumps straight to an offer, making more of them will not fix the gap. Match the argument to what the buyer already knows.

8 hours a night → 2,900 hours a year against your skin.

2 disposable bottles a day → 730 bottles a year avoided.

$4 a day → $1,460 a year.

The ad leads with 2,900, not 8. Find a number your product can honestly make meaningful over a year.

Find one order marked “shipped” whose tracking has not moved.

A label can be created before the carrier has the parcel. USPS and UPS both distinguish that status from receiving it.

Why this works:

Your rep:

Report: “First scans checked.”

A shipping notification should not be the last thing that moved.

The offer that added £200,000 a week

Ahead of Part 2, see how Valentte worked backward from a target order value to build its offer.

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