Thankful For Clicks: Black Friday/Cyber Monday Consumer Insights

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Every year, Thanksgiving marks the official kickoff to the holiday shopping season: a period characterized by spikes in digital activity, heightened consumer urgency, and record-breaking spend. But beneath the obvious surge in demand lies a more nuanced story. This year, RevU looked at our campaigns and found that it’s not just the typical increased ecommerce activity; offerwall is driving sophisticated behavior among consumers.

Across advertisers, categories, and campaign types, Black Friday/Cyber Monday didn't merely drive more users. It drove different users, behaving in different ways, and rewarding the advertisers whose offers aligned with their holiday mindset.

Holiday Shoppers Are Shopping Smarter

Marketers often assume that holiday lifts are purely volume driven, that more people are active shopping. Yes, Thanksgiving weekend brought more traffic and clicks,  but that wasn’t the most interesting shift.

The real story was audience quality during the Thanksgiving weekend.

Conversion rates climbed, not because advertisers forced more awareness into the funnel, but because shoppers arrived with purpose. Leisure time and cultural shopping norms turned passive traffic into high-intent sessions. Advertisers brought meaningful offers that provided the right incentives for consumers, at the right time.

Where a typical November weekday might see scattered micro-actions, holiday behavior clustered around decisive conversions. In other words: Thanksgiving didn’t just create more noise, it increased the signal.

The Big Winners Share a Common Approach

When examining the campaigns that meaningfully outperformed peers during the holiday period, a clear pattern emerged. It wasn’t the biggest budgets, the most complex funnels, or the best creative that won.

It was alignment.

A. Gaming and Casino Offers Thrived

Games that reward onboarding, offer stacked promotions, or incentivize multi-event participation surged. Why?

• Users have more free time; this especially contributes to multi-reward success when users can dedicate time to unlocking higher levels of reward.
• Reward mechanics remove perceived friction, making it easier to indulge
• Winning feels like part of the holiday ritual

The holiday period turned attention into action, and action into measurable ROI.

B. Commerce With Emotion Outperformed Pure Utility

Campaigns tied to gifting, indulgence, or self-care benefited from an emotional uplift. Offers resonated more deeply when buyers felt they were purchasing for themselves or someone they care about.

C. Donation and Gift-Based Incentives Exploded

The holiday season elevates generosity. Campaigns that asked little but meant a lot, i.e. gift cards, donations, time-bound bonuses, meaningfully over-indexed.

It’s a reminder that intent is contextual. The same offer can perform differently simply because the world feels different.

Not Every Vertical Performs Alike 

Holiday performance is not an immediately rising tide for all boats.

Financial products, especially those requiring weekday-linked actions like direct deposit setup, sometimes take a longer conversion path. Users may browse and explore during downtime, but execution often requires structure — something holiday weekends lack.

However, even here, a nuanced pattern emerged: while there may have been lower immediate engagement, the value of each deposit increased.

This suggests that while fewer users immediately converted, those who did represented higher-value intent. For sophisticated marketers, that’s gold. It means holiday periods can contribute to longer or richer conversion windows.

Efficiency > Scale: The Real KPI of the Holiday Window

The most successful campaigns were not necessarily those that drove the most clicks. They were those that:

• Monetized attention efficiently
  
  
• Had frictionless value propositions
  
  
• Matched emotion to context

RPC (revenue per click) became the North Star metric of the Thanksgiving period. The brands that focused on contextual fit, rather than brute-force spend, saw disproportionate gains.

During normal months, scale is the goal. During holidays, efficiency becomes the multiplier.

The Long Weekend Flywheel

The Black Friday-Cyber Monday period has evolved over time to be a major landmark in the digital economy calendar. But incentivized advertisers know that all long weekends enjoy unique characteristics that can be exploited for greater success.

Long weekends drive longer sessions, which in turn drive higher interest in rewards and in-app currency. 

This, combined with seasonally and emotionally relevant offers, drive a higher propensity to engage and convert. Whether it’s gaming offers during a higher period of gameplay, social casino offers presented at peak sports viewing times, or gift offers surfacing during the holiday shopping period, advertisers have a unique opportunity during BFCM to capture greater returns with offerwall.

Key Takeaways for Marketers

Black Friday/Cyber Monday may be over, but the holiday period - and long weekends - are on the horizon. Marketers should think ahead to seize on the opportunities coming in the next few weeks and months.

• Meet the moment; emotional offers enhance rational incentives, especially around holidays.
  
  
• Optimize for intent, not just volume; think about the broader context of each holiday weekend.
  
  
• Treat holiday windows as strategic, not seasonal
  
  

Performance marketing isn’t about buying attention, it’s about capturing intent. Holiday weekends are when intent goes on sale when it comes to incentivized advertising.

Conclusion

Thanksgiving didn’t just deliver more traffic this year. It revealed a unique audience psychology. It rewarded advertisers whose campaigns felt timely, meaningful, and effortless. And it reminded marketers of a truth that often hides beneath dashboards:

The right offer is the most powerful performance lever.

Brands that anticipated not just the season, but the state of mind that comes with it, seized rewards that come with thoughtful incentivized advertising.

As we look forward to Christmas, New Years, three-day weekends and Superbowl, brands should think about how to craft offers that resonate for maximum effectiveness. At RevU, we help our clients match the right offer to the right moment so that everyone wins. 

Reach out to your RevU representative to learn how we can help you outperform on your next offerwall campaign. 

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