The seasonal ad calendar for ecommerce

Seasonal moments compress a lot of buying into a few days or weeks. They also compress competition: more advertisers bid for the same people at the same time, which usually pushes up CPM in the busiest periods. Brands that do well in these windows tend to have done most of the work weeks earlier, with research finished, creative tested and offers decided before the rush.

This calendar covers the key retail moments for ecommerce brands selling in the EU, the UK and the US, with notes on when to start preparing. Many dates move each year, so the table says "usually" where that applies. Always check the exact date for the year you are planning.

Month-by-month calendar

Month	EU and UK	US	Start preparing for
January	New Year (1 Jan), January sales, resolutions (fitness, wellness, organization), Dry January and Veganuary in the UK	New Year, resolutions, Martin Luther King Jr. Day sales (third Monday)	Valentine's Day, UK Mother's Day
February	Valentine's Day (14 Feb); Lunar New Year usually falls between late January and mid-February	Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day sales (third Monday)	UK Mother's Day, Easter, spring launches
March	UK Mother's Day (usually March, three weeks before Easter Sunday), Father's Day in Italy, Spain and Portugal (19 March), spring launches	St Patrick's Day (17 March), spring	Easter, Mother's Day in the US and much of Europe
April	Easter (Easter Sunday falls between 22 March and 25 April), garden and outdoor	Easter, spring cleaning and outdoor	Mother's Day, Father's Day, summer
May	Mother's Day: second Sunday in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and others, first Sunday in Spain and Portugal, usually the last Sunday in France; UK bank holidays	Mother's Day (second Sunday), Memorial Day sales (last Monday)	Father's Day, summer, Prime Day
June	Father's Day in the UK (third Sunday), summer travel, wedding season	Father's Day (third Sunday), summer	Prime Day, back to school
July	Summer sales and holidays, Amazon Prime Day (usually July)	Independence Day sales (4 July), Prime Day	Back to school, autumn launches
August	Summer holidays; schools in Scotland usually return mid-August	Back to school, which starts in August in many states	Halloween, Singles' Day, Black Friday research
September	Back to school in England, Wales and much of the EU (usually early September), autumn launches	Labor Day sales (first Monday), fall launches	Black Friday creative, Christmas gifting
October	Halloween (31 Oct), Diwali (October or November), early Christmas gifting	Halloween, Amazon's October deal event in recent years	Final Black Friday and Cyber Monday creative, Christmas
November	Singles' Day (11 Nov), Black Friday, Cyber Monday	Veterans Day sales (11 Nov), Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday), Black Friday, Cyber Monday	Christmas shipping cut-offs, Boxing Day, January sales
December	Christmas, last order dates (usually mid-December), Boxing Day (26 Dec), New Year's Eve	Hanukkah (dates vary, usually December), Christmas, last shipping days, post-Christmas sales	January sales, resolutions, Valentine's Day

Dates worth double-checking every year

• Black Friday is the day after US Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November, so it lands between 23 and 29 November. Cyber Monday follows three days later. EU and UK retailers use the same dates, and many now run promotions across the whole week or longer.
• Singles' Day is fixed on 11 November. It began in China and is far bigger there than in Europe, but some European retailers run 11.11 promotions as an early start to the November sales.
• UK Mother's Day, or Mothering Sunday, is the fourth Sunday of Lent, exactly three weeks before Easter Sunday. It usually falls in March and occasionally in early April. Brands selling in the UK as well as the US or continental Europe need two separate Mother's Day campaigns.
• Easter moves between late March and late April, which also moves UK Mother's Day and spring promotions.
• Moving festivals such as Lunar New Year, Ramadan, Eid and Diwali follow lunar or lunisolar calendars and shift each year.
• Christmas shipping cut-offs depend on your carriers. Publish your own last order dates early and build ads around them.

When to start preparing

A useful rule is to have creative tested before the peak rather than during it. Peak days are an expensive place to discover that a new concept does not work. The timeline below is a starting point to adapt to your production speed.

Moment size	Examples	Research starts	Creative production	Warm-up and list building	Offer live
Major	Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas	10 to 12 weeks before	6 to 8 weeks before	2 to 4 weeks before	The sale period
Medium	Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, back to school	6 to 8 weeks before	3 to 5 weeks before	1 to 2 weeks before	The final 1 to 2 weeks
Minor	Halloween, Easter, Singles' Day for most EU brands	About 4 weeks before	2 to 3 weeks before	A few days	The day or weekend

Work backwards from fixed constraints. Inventory and supplier lead times, creator availability in October and November, and your last shipping date for Christmas all set hard limits. For gifting moments, the final days before a shipping cut-off usually belong to urgency messaging, and after the cut-off you can switch to gift cards, digital products or express delivery.

Budget planning benefits from looking back too. If you know roughly how your CPMs and conversion rates moved last year, you can model the spend needed to hit your targets with an ad budget calculator instead of guessing.

Using last year's ads to plan this year

The most useful research for a seasonal campaign is what your competitors ran in the same window last year. You cannot see their spend or results, but you can see what they launched, when, and for how long.

1. Pick five to ten brands. Include direct competitors and a couple of adjacent brands that sell to the same customer.
2. Filter by last year's dates. In an ad library, set the launch date to the same window, for example October and November for Black Friday, and narrow by niche and country.
3. Note the start dates. When did each brand launch its first seasonal ads? Early-access and sign-up ads often appear well before the sale itself.
4. Record the offers. Percentage off, tiered discounts, bundles, gifts with purchase or free shipping thresholds. Note which brands avoided discounting entirely.
5. Look at formats and angles. Gift guides, countdowns, last-order reminders, founder messages and UGC unboxings tend to show up at different points in the season.
6. Check longevity. Ads that kept running after the sale were probably working well enough to keep, and some become evergreen. Our post on ad longevity as a profit signal explains how to read this carefully.
7. Build a timeline. Put each brand's launches on one calendar. Gaps and crowded weeks become obvious.

What you can find depends on where the ads ran. Meta's Ad Library shows active ads broadly, but inactive commercial ads are mainly retained for the EU, where the Digital Services Act requires platforms to keep ads in their repositories for a year after they last ran. Our explainer on EU ad transparency covers what that includes.

A simple planning sheet

For each moment you plan to run, write down:

• The date, and your last order or shipping date
• The audience, and whether they are buying for themselves or someone else
• The offer and the margin it leaves
• Three creative concepts and who is producing them
• Launch dates for warm-up, sale and post-sale ads
• Budget and target CPA for the period
• The landing page or collection each ad will send people to

Planning with PixelSpyer

PixelSpyer's ad library is built for this kind of look back. It holds more than 3.1 million Facebook and Instagram ads collected from the public Meta Ad Library, mostly ads delivered in the EU and UK, with filters for launch date, running days, active status, niche and country, so you can pull up last year's seasonal ads in your category quickly. Save the best into a seasonal board in your swipe file, and add key competitors to the brand tracker so you are alerted as soon as they start this year's campaigns.