Amazon ad costs in Q4: Prime Big Deal Days to Christmas

As we approach the holiday season on Amazon, we looked back at Q4 last year to understand the trends and spot opportunities. We looked at 25 US Amazon stores, totaling over $4.3M in ad spend and $14.2M in ad sales in Q4 2025. The key takeaway was that Q4 is a series of very different periods, each with its own prices and shoppers. Throughout this post, we’ll compare each store against its own baseline: its average over the four quiet weeks before each event.

Often, CPC and cost per order move in tandem (if CVR is fairly stable, then a 10% increase in CPC will equate to a 10% increase in cost per order). During the holidays, however, shopper behavior changes (CVRs go up), and we see the two metrics diverge. Cost per order is the amount we spend on ads to get a sale. In Q4, we see the two levers that drive cost per order moving in different directions: 1) clicks are more expensive and 2) shoppers are more likely to buy on the big days. For Q4 strategy, we’ll focus most closely on cost per order. That’s also how we bid at Laurence: we price each click from what it’s worth in orders and margin, not what it costs, and reprice every hour.

How do Amazon ad costs change on Prime Big Deal Days?

Clicks get more expensive, but cost per order barely moves. Over the two days of the event (October 7 and 8, 2025), top of search clicks cost 37% more than baseline, and clicks overall cost 22% more. Shoppers bought significantly more, though, so cost per order only increased 11% and daily sales were up 50%. That’s exactly the sort of result we’re looking for from our brands. This year’s event (October 6 and 7) saw it happen again: across 22 stores, cost per order fell 6% and daily sales rose 40%.

Why do Amazon ads get more expensive before Black Friday?

Brands start competing for holiday shoppers before those shoppers are ready to buy. In the seven days before Black Friday (Nov 21-27), we see click prices rise faster than buying does. Click prices are 17% above baseline and 34% above baseline at the top of search, while conversion is up only 8% and daily sales only 7%. Cost per order is therefore 8% above baseline.

How much more do Amazon ads cost on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Click prices peak over the four day period from Black Friday (Nov 28) through to Cyber Monday (Dec 1). Click prices are 17% above each store’s baseline (its own average from Oct 13 to Nov 9), and stay 17 to 21% above it on each of the four days. The Saturday and Sunday in between are more expensive per order than the event days on Friday and Monday. This is driven by CPCs remaining high across all four days, but CVRs only spiking on Friday (+27%) and Monday (+17%). As a result, cost per order is flat or lower on Black Friday (−5%) and Cyber Monday (0%), but up 15 to 18% on Saturday and Sunday. Across the four days as a whole, cost per order rose only 5% while daily sales rose 34%.

The price increase is almost entirely at the top of search. From Black Friday through Cyber Monday, top of search clicks cost 37% more than baseline, product page clicks 7% more, and other placements 8% more. Shoppers at the top of search convert 23% better, so cost per order is up 11%. On product pages, conversion didn’t improve, so cost per order is up 10%. On other placements, cost per order is down 4%. If you’re going to increase your bids for Black Friday, increase only your top of search bids, and only where the cost per order is still going to pay. This is how Laurence prices placements: the model holds a separate conversion rate for top of search, rest of search and product pages, and prices each one against it, so top of search only gets more where it converts.

Another big focus this period is building momentum for Christmas shopping lists. We know Amazon’s search will favor products that are selling, so sales on those days can go a long way toward lifting organic rank as we head into the Christmas season. Check out our journal on branded vs. non-branded Amazon ads to learn more about how paid sales feed into organic rank.

Is mid December the cheapest time for Amazon ads?

Historically, we’ve seen it be the cheapest stretch, if you measure by cost per order. Last year, after Cyber Monday, click prices returned to baseline while buying held up. From Dec 8 to 21, click prices were flat on baseline and conversion was up 13%, so cost per order was 12% below baseline. Across the year, the weeks of Dec 8 and Dec 15 had the lowest cost per order of any weeks we tracked (22 to 24% below each store’s annual average). This is one year of data, and cost per order fell at 15 of 25 stores rather than all of them, so treat it as a pattern we’ve seen rather than a rule. Budgets assuming a generally expensive Q4 often miss it.

What happens to Amazon ads after the Christmas shipping cutoff?

Last year, Dec 22 was the final day you could order for two-day Prime delivery prior to Christmas. From Dec 23 through to Christmas Day, click prices didn’t move (flat on baseline), but shopper activity collapsed: daily sales fell 42% and conversion fell 11%. So each order cost 13% more. That was at 18 of the 25 stores. Most of the other stores had already pulled spend back to their best keywords. This is the Q4 period that can really bite brands, as click prices don’t go down but buying does.

Our holiday gift to you: how should you be planning your Amazon Ads for Q4?

1. 01
   Judging Q4 on cost per order rather than CPC.On the big days last year clicks were 17 to 22% more expensive, but orders were only 5 to 11% more expensive, as customers were more likely to buy.
2. 02
   There could be an opportunity in selectively raising the top of search.It was responsible for most of the price increase (37% from Black Friday to Cyber Monday) so it may be worth pushing it up selectively where your margin can bear it. If you use Amazon’s dynamic bids, up and down, they already raise top of search bids on their own.
3. 03
   Time spend around the buying days.The week before Black Friday and the weekend in the middle cost 8 to 18% more per order, while cost per order on Black Friday and Cyber Monday stayed close to normal. Plan changes ahead of the dates, since anything that reacts to past results tends to land late.
4. 04
   Don’t miss mid-December.Orders were cheapest from Dec 8 to 21 so be very careful about pulling back budgets at that stage.
5. 05
   Pull back after Amazon’s last order date for Christmas delivery.Daily sales fell 42% and CVRs 11% after the cutoff while click prices held, so focus spend on your best-converting keywords until the new year.

How we measured this. 25 US Amazon stores on the Laurence platform. The 16 whose Amazon sales we can see sold over $150M on Amazon in the past year, and five sold over $10M each. Sponsored Products only, October 1 to December 31, 2025: $4.3M of ad spend, $14.2M of ad sales and 2.16M clicks, from Amazon’s own ad reports (Amazon Ads API) with purchases at Amazon’s standard 7-day attribution. Each store is compared with its own baseline (October 13 to November 9 for Black Friday and December, September 1 to 28 for Prime Big Deal Days), and we average the stores’ changes on a log scale (a geometric mean), so the cost per order change always equals the CPC change divided by the CVR change. Stores with too few clicks or no orders in a period are left out of that period, so counts range from 16 to 26. Most of these stores were not yet on Laurence in 2025, so CPC shows what brands paid, not a pure market price. We update this post each January.