Q4 is where performance marketing earns its keep. From Black Friday through to Christmas, the 2025 peak trading season tested every part of our playbook, and the Media Merchants team delivered.
The backdrop
Christmas 2025 was not an easy ride for Australian retailers. November’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday drove headline spending up, with ABS retail turnover hitting $39.1 billion (+7% YoY), but December told a different story. The ABS Household Spending Indicator fell 0.4%, consumer confidence dipped, and discretionary categories like clothing and furnishings took a hit. Shoppers were willing to spend, but only during key sale moments, and only when given a strong reason to act.
For our clients, that meant every campaign had to earn its results. No coasting on seasonal tailwinds. Here is how two of our accounts performed.
The results
We manage a portfolio of home appliance brands that run extensive promotional calendars across Q4. Coordinating campaigns across Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Christmas gifting window required tight planning, tailored creative for each brand, and daily hands-on optimisation.
December alone, the paid channel (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Meta Ads) results spoke for themselves:
– Revenue: +29% YoY
– Sales: +35% YoY
– ROAS: +8% YoY
On the health, beauty and wellbeing side, we were running campaigns across Google Ads, Meta and TikTok for a leading brand in a category where gifting drives a huge share of Q4 revenue. Our focus was on capturing high-intent gift shoppers through branded search, targeted Shopping campaigns and prospecting to bring new customers into the brand.
The combined result across all three platforms:
– Spend: +37% YoY
– Revenue: +49% YoY
– ROAS: +9% YoY
In both cases, higher investment translated directly into stronger returns, not just more spend for the sake of it.
What made the difference
Strong Q4 results do not happen by accident. Behind every impressive number is weeks of preparation, daily optimisation, and a team that genuinely cares about client outcomes. A few things stood out as particularly important this year:
- Early planning. We began peak preparation months in advance, aligning promotional calendars with campaign builds and creative refreshes well before the rush hit.
- Real-time agility. The team operated with a live-monitoring cadence throughout peak, making intraday adjustments that captured opportunity and contained waste.
- Cross-channel coordination. Rather than treating each platform in isolation, we ensured messaging and budget allocation worked in concert across Google, Meta, TikTok and any additional channels in the mix.
- Measurement rigour. Every decision was grounded in data. We leaned on conversion tracking, attribution insights, and live dashboards to guide our daily actions.
Looking ahead
Christmas 2025 was a strong reminder of what a focused, well-prepared performance team can achieve. But as always, we are already looking forward. The insights gathered during Q4 are now feeding into our planning for the year ahead, helping us refine strategies, identify new growth opportunities, and set even more ambitious targets for each client.
To every member of the performance team who put in the extra hours, kept a close eye on the data, and delivered exceptional results for our clients: well done. This is the standard we hold ourselves to, and Christmas 2025 showed exactly why our clients trust us with their most important trading periods.
If you are looking for a performance marketing partner that treats your peak trading periods with the urgency and discipline they deserve, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with our team at admin@mediamerchants.com.au.
