Welcome to Q5, the Best-Kept Secret in Paid Ads

When is the cheapest, most profitable time to run paid ads?

The window between Christmas and late January, which Meta has started calling "Q5". Ad costs drop because the big brands stop bidding, but customers are still in a spending mood. Meta's own figures put CPMs around 6% lower and conversions around 16% higher. Fewer advertisers, warm buyers: cheaper attention and better results at the same time.

Q5, apparently

According to Meta, we are now in Q5. Quarter five.

I am no mathematician, but I was fairly sure the maximum number of quarters anything could have was, checks fingers, four. Nonetheless, that is what Meta call the stretch between Christmas and late January.

Why it is worth knowing

Here is the useful bit. In Q4, the run-up to Christmas, CPMs can be sky high. (That is Cost Per Mille, what Meta charges to show your ad to a thousand people, rather than Crazy Price Markup, although in Q4 that is also true.) All the big brands are throwing money at ad space, so the price of attention rockets, which puts a lot of smaller advertisers off entirely.

In "Q5", that flips. According to Meta, during this window CPMs run around 6.3% lower AND conversions around 16% higher.

Cheaper attention and a buying mood at once

Why is this time of year so different? It is simple, and it is the bit most people miss.

There is less competition, because the big brands have stopped buying up all the ad space now Christmas is over. But buyers are still in a big-spending mood: they have gift money, New Year momentum, and an appetite to treat themselves. So you get the rare combination of cheaper clicks and warm, ready-to-buy customers at the same moment.

Why most advertisers get it backwards

Here is the quiet irony. Most advertisers pile in during the expensive pre-Christmas frenzy, then pull back exactly when things get cheap and easy. They pause campaigns in early January to "recover from Christmas", and hand the quiet, high-converting window to whoever stayed switched on.

Whether you have run paid ads for years or you are only now thinking about your first campaign, this stretch between Christmas and late January is one of the best times all year to have something running. The advertisers who understand Q5 are buying discounted attention while everyone else is asleep.

Meet Brian

The cheap window only pays off if the ad running in it is actually good enough to convert. That is where Brian, our AI Comedy Marketing Machine, comes in.

Brian helps you spin up entertaining, high-converting ad creatives fast, using the same frameworks our writers use, so you can seize a window like Q5 without spending a fortnight making the ads first.

Take Brian for a spin and make the most of the quarter nobody else is watching.