Black Friday 2026: how to avoid wasting marketing budget

Black Friday 2026 is shaping up as a confident quarter for UK marketers, and a more cautious one for the shoppers they are trying to reach. That gap is where budget gets wasted.

Marketers are planning to spend more and expecting it to pay back, with 93% forecasting higher sales than last year. Most of that money has one job, since 79% is going into performance and direct response against just 8% leaning towards brand. UK consumers are moving the other way, cutting back on non-essentials and taking longer to decide what is worth buying. When budget is weighted towards immediate conversion and shoppers are deliberately holding off, a lot of it ends up chasing sales that were never going to happen in the window.

New Epsilon research shows where that waste happens across the peak window, which runs from Black Friday through to the January sales, and how to plan around it.

What to expect from UK consumers this Black Friday

UK shoppers are not leaving the market, they are being more careful about what they buy and when. 63% are deferring bigger purchases, and 39% say they are buying less often but choosing better when they do.

ONS figures give the reason, with real UK household disposable income per head down 0.8% on the previous quarter. The IPA Bellwether, which surveys around 300 UK marketing professionals every quarter, picks up the same caution from the other direction. Asked about their own company's prospects, the net balance was -9.6% in Q2 2026, while for their industry's prospects it fell to -25.1%. Confidence in your own plan tends to run some way ahead of confidence in the market it is landing in.

The spending power itself has not disappeared, and 48% of shoppers still plan to treat themselves at some point across the season. UK consumers expect to spend £334 each over the peak window, or £17.9bn in total, but that spending is now more considered, which makes the timing of your budget matter more than its size.

How to set realistic goals for Q4

The mechanics of Black Friday have not changed. What needs to change is what you ask each pound to do and how you judge whether it worked.

1. Give each part of the budget a different job and a different measure, and agree those measures before the quarter starts. Visibility, consideration and conversion are not the same task and should not share a KPI. A consideration campaign judged on last-click return will look like a failure and get switched off in week two.
2. Measure incremental return instead of total return. Total ROAS rewards you for reaching people who were always going to buy, which is the wrong thing to optimise towards in a quarter when a shrinking group accounts for most of the purchases.
3. Run your non-buyer filter over 30 to 60 days, because a seven day window is not long enough when so many shoppers are deferring. Anything shorter will under-credit the work done in November and over-credit whatever reaches them in January.
4. Cap frequency deliberately, because over-frequency is the most common form of waste in a low-conversion quarter and it is also the easiest of them to fix once somebody is actually measuring it.
5. Move budget towards the moments on the UK retail calendar where competition is thinner. Our research puts the share of shoppers converting on Black Friday at 50%, falling to 37% on Boxing Day and 34% in the January sales, but the gap in what it costs to reach those audiences is far wider than the gap in how well they convert.
6. Fix in-store measurement before you scale spend. 93% of UK marketers say they are confident proving the impact of paid digital on online sales, but that falls to 88% for shops, and 55% say their partners give them too little data to plan across channels at all.

How to justify those goals to your leadership team

Changing what a campaign is measured on is an easier conversation to have with two arguments prepared.

The first is that not everybody is going to buy during peak, so a plan that assumes they will is a plan that misses. When most of the growth has to come from shoppers who are deliberately holding off, a pure conversion target asks the team to capture demand that has not formed yet. Setting consideration actions as a legitimate mark of success means the campaigns that moved people closer to buying get counted, instead of appearing at the end of the quarter as money that did nothing.

The second is that your peak season customer is not shopping for themselves. Across the peak window people buy for other people, to a deadline and against a list, and in January they revert to the behaviour your loyalty programme records already describe. That is what makes retail media worth treating as a consideration channel this quarter and not only a conversion one. 56% of UK consumers say they feel more confident in a brand promoted by a retailer they already shop with, and among Gen Z 71% say seeing a brand consistently makes them more confident about buying, against 48% of consumers overall. A shopper who keeps seeing you in a retailer environment in November has a reason to trust you in January, when they are buying for themselves again.

Both arguments rest on being able to prove the upper funnel worked. If success in Q4 is a consideration action instead of a sale, you have to show that the same person who saw the ad in November came back for a second touchpoint in December and bought in January. That is a tracking problem before it is a media problem, and with third-party cookies unreliable the join has to come from data you already own. Epsilon resolves identity on deterministic signals such as name and address, so one person with four email addresses is recognised as one customer and not four, and the journey from first exposure through to purchase stays visible across channels.

Get the full Golden Quarter research

Advertising Under Pressure is based on two studies Epsilon commissioned in 2026. The first surveyed 2,000 UK adults, weighted to be nationally representative. The second surveyed 200 UK marketing decision makers, all of them controlling £500,000 or more in annual marketing budget at brands turning over £5m or more.

Alongside everything above, the report covers where UK consumers are actually discovering brands and how far that sits from where marketers are putting their money, which moments across the peak retail calendar carry the strongest conversion and which are cheapest to reach, how loyalty and switching behaviour differ by category, what the trust gap between retailers and brands means for younger shoppers, and a five point action plan for the £17.9bn UK consumers expect to spend across the peak window.

Download the report