Elephant Room launches tool to track BFCM retail campaign trends

Australian eCommerce performance agency Elephant Room has launched the BFCM Benchmark Performance Index, a platform aimed at providing retailers with comprehensive performance data for the crucial fourth-quarter sales period.

Trading insight

The new index analyses millions of campaign data points collected from November 2024 to January 2025. It aims to help brands navigate trading during Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day by offering market benchmarks for spend, conversion rates, and media costs. The platform allows businesses to model trends in media inflation, track acquisition benchmarks, and assess campaign timing and channel efficiency.

Key findings from the index show that Black Friday typically generates around 7.8% of a retailer's monthly revenue, compared to 2-3% on regular days. The analysis also indicates campaign costs, such as CPM (cost per mille), peak on Black Friday and then decline through December, providing a window for brands to optimise ad spend across channels.

Strategic planning

Elephant Room intends for brands to use the index as a framework for setting budgets, forecasting revenue, and comparing marketing efficiency. The data highlights the benefit for brands in launching campaigns around 17 November, when conversion rates tend to lift.

The tool provides detail on daily revenue completion, CPM and CPC (cost per click) trends, and channel benchmarking. For instance, TikTok is generally associated with lower CPMs, but Meta and Google deliver higher click-through rates, offering options for channel mix optimisation. The index can also flag when CPM inflation is above average starting from early November, allowing marketers to adjust spend accordingly.

Access to data

This marks the first time Elephant Room has shared its internal Q4 data sets, which have informed its approach to retail marketing performance since the agency's founding in 2014. In addition to domestic brands, the agency has recently expanded to work with international clients such as Outcast Clothing and Khy by Kylie Jenner.

"For more than a decade, our team has poured thousands of hours into cracking the code of Q4 performance. Every year, we build sophisticated ad forecasts, budgets and pacing strategies for the critical BFCM/Boxing Day retail trading period. The app essentially gives you a "weather forecast" for the BFCM period so you can plan budgets, set targets, and adjust tactics based on proven patterns across 65+ brands and millions in ad spend. Now, we're opening our playbook. We're giving brands a live read on what's driving results, helping them plan smarter around launch timing, spend, and revenue targets. By leveraging real, anonymised campaign data from across our portfolio, we're giving brands the confidence and precision they need to plan, predict and perform, during a period that can account for up to 30% of their annual revenue. Our new BFCM Benchmark Performance Index is a powerful planning tool for budgeting and strategy. We've found it invaluable and we're confident other brands will too," said Adam Sharon-Zipser, Managing Director, Elephant Room.

Market response

The index enables brands to benchmark their performance against market averages for key acquisition metrics. This can help refine strategies as demand surges and media costs fluctuate. The tool aims to simplify how brands determine the timing and scale of their sales, particularly during periods that can account for as much as 30% of annual revenue.