Wait, is it really BFCM season already?

Today’s Social Media advertising rates are marrying your gym teacher:

↗️ META: $7.53 CPM | ↗️ TIKTOK: $5.43 CPM | ↘️ SNAPCHAT: $9.27 CPM

In this week’s edition: 

• 🔎  Why did Amazon put its Google ads on a crash diet? 

• TikTok is testing a keyword-planning tool like Google’s ⏰

• 👽 Reddit is developing its own AI automation suite

But first…

🎁 Wait, is it really BFCM season already?

Sure, yeah, we’ve got one last long weekend to go, but you can feel it in the air: summer’s over, and the bust-your-ass race to the end of the year is about to kick in, hard. 

We can tell because the BFCM emails have already started rolling in. Chief among them: Meta’s “Countdown to Cyber 5 2025” deck, which offers tips on how to “win the holiday auction” and a slew of predictions and stats to guide your strategy.

💡 TL;DR? Holiday shopping is no longer a weekend sprint: it’s a marathon. Nearly 1 in 5 shoppers start in October, and Gen Z and Millennials keep buying well into January. According to Meta’s best practices, winning this season means leaning into Advantage+, creators, and AI to keep CPAs efficient, and building omni strategies that extend past the shipping cutoff. 

Recommended moves for media pros (some of which will look familiar to longtime The Thread readers, or anyone who’s perused our annual guides to BFCM and the steadily-expanding holiday shopping szn):

• Start early, spend smart. Launch holiday creative and Advantage+ sales campaigns now to lock in efficient CPAs and capture October intent.

• Lean into Advantage+. (Our typical Ad+ caveats apply: know your check boxes.) Whether you’re driving sales, apps, or leads, Meta claims its AI optimizations are driving up to 9% better CPA. And from creative diversification to personalized shopping, AI is already shaping nearly 1 in 5 purchases.

• Bet on creators. 80% of followers buy from creator-led discovery. Start sourcing now.

• Dominate Cyber 5. Black Friday through Cyber Monday remains the most profitable window—optimize promos and budgets for peak conversions.

• Think omni, not silo. Post-shipping, pivot to omnichannel tools to keep sales flowing in-store and online.

💰 Why Cyber 5 still matters: Holiday sales topped $994B in 2024 (+4% YoY), with Cyber 5 alone driving $41B (+8.2%). Meta’s platforms influenced 79% of shoppers who discovered products there, and AI touched nearly $229B in global online sales.

The Inside Scoop🍦: Now trending in performance media

♾️ Meta has always allowed advertisers to set an ad-set spending limit. This allowed you to set a minimum or a hard maximum per ad set. However, now it appears that Meta is changing this to an “average ad set spending limit”—meaning that Meta won’t spend more than that per day on average.

🔎 Google Ads: In a move toward increased transparency and better visibility into brand safety, Google is now letting advertisers see exactly where their Search, Shopping, and App campaign ads are running across the Search Partner Network (SPN), with full site-level impression data. 

🤖 Search campaigns will drop manual language settings by the end of 2025, leaving AI to automatically detect and target user languages.   

📊 Channel Reporting for Performance Max campaigns is now available at the account level, not just within individual campaigns. 

Speaking of channel reporting, Google’s rolling out a “share of cost” toggle to let advertisers see how much of their PMax spend is going to each channel.

⏰ TikTok is planning to test a Keyword Planner tool for Search Ads this fall. It’s described as “a powerful tool [that] enables you to generate high-quality keywords easily and gain insights into their performance potential before allocating your budget.” 

🧪 Also in testing: a new feature called “Accelerate New Creative Testing Mode,” designed to prevent newly launched ads from getting stuck in limited delivery. The tool prioritizes creatives updated within the past seven days, giving them earlier testing opportunities. 

🏷️ In a move that’s been popular among other social platforms, TikTok is now capping hashtags at five per post. Across the industry: X dropped hashtags from ads, Meta’s Threads limits posts to one topic tag, and Instagram is testing a five-hashtag cap. LinkedIn has de-emphasized them.

💡Pro Tip: If you use new ads in an old TikTok ad set that was built in the past but never launched, the copy will show the original ad set creation date when users click into it. 

👽 Reddit will launch Auto Targeting in October. This will let advertisers use "Run of Site" by leaving all ‘audience suggestions’ blank. This means auto targeting can operate completely automatically, without any manually input audience fields from the advertiser. The model will optimize delivery using signals such as ad creative and landing page content, so providing specific audience hints is optional, not required.  

🧪 Opening in Beta in September: Reddit Max, the platform’s entry into the AI-automated advertising sweepstakes. More to come soon, but initial descriptions indicate RMax will include AI-enhanced creative, budget allocation, and bidding.

🏈 Reddit users are 21% more likely to identify as hardcore sports fans than the average social media user. Check out Reddit’s new sports-marketing playbook for more insights.

📈 Amazon pulled all of their spend from Google Shopping ads last month, immediately disrupting the auction. Amazon has now resumed Google Shopping spending in international markets, exactly one month later—which would seem to support a theory that Amazon was stress-testing its reliance on Google traffic. However, Amazon spending remains off in the U.S. at least for now. Interestingly, a study from Optmyzr found that when Amazon went dark, clicks rose for other retailers, but ROAS dropped.

🧠 Get smart: What the heck is co-viewing measurement? 

In the TV and streaming ad market, co-viewing measurement refers to counting how many people are in the room watching together when an ad or program airs. However, many consider it to be a problematic metric based on fuzzy math—and as advertising has moved from linear TV to streaming, it’s become one of the most hotly contested elements of CTV attribution. Want to get a firmer understanding of how co-viewing is being incorporated into CPM pricing before you book TV and CTV buys? Check out Digiday’s explainer. 

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back next week to fill your inbox with more tips, tricks, and treats from the addressable universe.

In the meantime, stay up to date with the latest performance marketing intelligence by following us on Linkedin, Instagram, and X.