Has anyone noticed their conversion rates and ROAS dropping during the holiday season?

[gardenia856]

You’re not crazy for seeing worse ROAS in December. Toy auctions on Meta/Google get brutal around Black Friday–Christmas; CPMs spike and you’re basically paying “holiday tax” while shoppers also bounce around more comparing deals.

Main thing I’d do is separate “gift buyers” from regular shoppers. Build campaigns just for gift keywords (age + type of toy + “gift”) and others for evergreen stuff, then cap bids / budgets differently so the high-CPC gift stuff doesn’t drain everything.

Also, don’t assume free shipping helped; if you didn’t raise prices or push bundles, your margin may have quietly died even if ROAS looked similar. Do a simple sheet: AOV, product margin, shipping, ad cost per order.

Instead of random AI ad tools, I’d start with something like Triple Whale or even basic GA4 + Microsoft Clarity to see where people drop off; then tools like Ryze AI or Pulse for Reddit plus manual sub testing can help you pull real language and objections from parents before you tweak creatives again.

Core point: pause what isn’t converting by day 3–5, protect margin first.

[ppcwithyrv]

You definitely need an expert if you are using ChatGPT as your primary method of optimizing your campaign.

[ArcIntermedia]

Costs for CPCs/CPM during this season rise significantly with the crowded advertising space, which can have your ROAS looking low, even despite increased sales volume. I’d look at this first to confirm if it’s a high cost issue or a low sales issue.

Also second to another comment above – tightening up keywords to focus really hard on ready-to-buy intent rather than overall product category might lift conversion rates as well.

Another helpful tip to help with competition is to make a ton of searches for the terms you’re looking for and investigate other brands and ads copy, creative, types, that come up. See what you might need to do in order to stand out.

The holiday/Christmas season is now over, but hopefully this also helps with other seasonal spikes this year!

[QuantumWolf99]

Your ROAS dropping during Q4 is completely normal for toy ecom… some of the accounts I manage at $200k+ monthly spend saw CPMs spike 42-66% Nov. to Dec. 2025, which crushes ROAS even when conversions hold steady. You’re competing against every retail brand dumping budgets into Meta during peak season.

ChatGPT keyword suggestions are generic and don’t account for auction dynamics or toy-specific intent… waiving shipping when everyone else already did means you just matched baseline and compressed margins without creating advantage.

Those AI tools (Multiply AI, Ryze AI, LocalIQ) are white-label dashboards that auto-apply Meta’s recommendations… they don’t understand unit economics.

For toys, Q4 is 60-70% of annual revenue but margin compression from discounting + CPM inflation means December ROAS naturally drops 30-40% vs off-season even when optimized correctly.

IMO –> launch awareness campaigns in October when CPMs are 40% cheaper to build retargeting pools before the bidding war starts… segment high-AOV buyers from bargain hunters because toy category has massive price sensitivity during holidays.

Accounts at scale run separate campaigns for premium ($50+ toys) vs impulse purchases ($10-20 range) because they convert through completely different funnels and timeframes.

[Available_Cup5454]

Hold spend steady and rebuild creative and offer framing for post holiday buyers because Q4 gift intent masks weak year round demand signals

[Single-Sea-7804]

You’re in a highly, highly competitive market during the holiday season. CPC’s spike heavily during this period and if you don’t have your margins well though out, your ROAS and overall profitability will suffer with advertising and other costs that you incur.