Holiday advertisers are getting a discount on attention at the exact moment shoppers are getting pickier about where they spend it. New Q3 data from advertising platform AdRoll shows display prospecting costs falling sharply in the weeks before Black Friday. That gap, cheap reach meeting cautious buyers, is the real story here, not the discount itself.
Between July 1 and Sept. 8, AdRoll recorded display prospecting CPMs running 45% below the same period last year and 25.5% under Q2 levels. Retargeting CPMs, the cost to re-reach shoppers who already visited a site, dropped 29.1% compared with last year and were down 40.2% versus Q2.
Account-based marketing moved the opposite direction: CPMs there rose 4.4% year over year, even as they still sat 15.1% below Q2. AdRoll’s own framing matters here: because ABM targets a narrow list of named accounts rather than a broad audience, its pricing swings say less about the overall ad market than the prospecting and retargeting numbers do.
The economic backdrop explains why marketers should treat the cheaper CPMs as an opportunity with strings attached. In August, U.S. inflation stayed at 3.4%. A closely watched gauge, the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment, dropped to 47.8 in September, a 13.2% decline from a year earlier. Bank of America card data, meanwhile, showed household spending rising 4.5% compared with a year earlier during August, concentrated among value-focused and big-box retailers.
Those three data points do not point in one direction, and AdRoll’s report does not claim they do. Consumers are still spending more, but sentiment is falling and shoppers are consolidating purchases at chains known for discounting. Cheaper media buys more impressions. They do not, by themselves, buy more sales.
That is the mechanism worth watching this quarter. A 45% drop in prospecting CPMs lowers the cost of getting in front of a shopper. It says nothing about whether that shopper converts once weaker sentiment has already made them more price-sensitive and more loyal to retailers with a value reputation. Advertisers who treat the cheaper inventory as a free win, without adjusting pricing, promotions and messaging to match a more selective buyer, risk trading CPM savings for a worse cost per acquisition.
The practical opening is earlier in the funnel. Lower prospecting costs let brands introduce themselves to new audiences, test which offers and messages actually land, and build a retargeting pool before the seasonal CPM run-up hits in November. Retargeting that audience later, once purchase intent is clearer, is where the current 29.1% discount becomes easiest to convert into revenue.
Marketers running Q4 holiday campaigns should treat the next several weeks as a testing window, not a reach-buying spree. Teams should use the current CPM discount to build and refine retargeting audiences now, before costs climb back up once Black Friday and Cyber Monday demand hits.
Search Engine Land reported the AdRoll Q3 findings in a story published Sept. 22, 2026.
