01 / Introduction

The holiday week test

Every week we aggregate first-party, order-verified data across hundreds of eCommerce accounts and publish the four grids: new customer acquisition, first click versus last click, overall channel performance, and new customer lifetime value. One story per issue. This week the story is what a holiday sale week actually does to your acquisition numbers, because this data week ran from August 30 through September 5, the run-up to Labor Day and the Saturday of the holiday weekend itself.

I want to answer two questions honestly. Did the holiday produce more sales? Yes, clearly. Did it drive costs up? Mostly no, and that surprise is the lesson.

02 / Analysis 

 More buyers, cheaper new customers, one exception

Here is what the sale week did. New visit to customer conversion rose on almost every channel: Meta up 22%, YouTube up 50%, organic up 30% week over week. Shoppers in a buying mood convert faster on the same clicks. And because conversion rose faster than click prices did, the cost of a verified new customer fell across nearly the whole paid grid. Meta's CPC actually rose about 4%, and its nCAC still dropped to $85. 

Now the exception, because it is the most interesting row on the chart. Google was the only major channel where things got worse: conversion down 6%, nCAC up 4% to $161. Holiday demand this week was discovery demand. People scrolling a feed saw a sale and bought. They were not typing product searches into Google. When the buying impulse comes from the calendar instead of from intent, social and video channels harvest it and search sits it out. If you moved budget toward search for the holiday because search is your "reliable" channel, you paid more per new customer than the brands who let the feed channels run. 

 Here is the honest note, and this week it is the entire point. Every improvement on this page is a calendar artifact, not a structural change. Sale weeks pull demand forward and put shoppers in a converting mood, so every channel's numbers flatter the people running them. The trap is attribution of skill: the media buyer credits the new creative, the platform credits its algorithm, and next week, when a chunk of this demand has been pulled forward and conversion gives some of this back, the same people will be asked what broke. Nothing will have broken. The calendar will have moved on. Benchmark this week against holiday weeks, not against next week. And because this data blends hundreds of accounts, no single brand's promotion moved these aggregates; this is the market-wide holiday effect. 

03 / New Customer Acquisition 

The full acquisition picture, by channel

Meta had the week you would design on a whiteboard: 88% of its buyers were new, conversion up 22%, and an $85 nCAC, its cheapest of the past month. YouTube's conversion snapped back 50% after last week's slump, pulling its nCAC from $826 down to $520, a reminder that low-volume channels swing hard in both directions. TikTok more than doubled its conversion rate off a small base and cleared the thin-data bar this week, though one good holiday week is not a trend. Google is the row your CFO should ask about, and the answer is in the analysis above. 

04 / First Click vs Last Click 

Who starts the sale vs who takes the bow

The 90 day pattern held steady through the holiday: last click shortchanges the feed and video channels that open relationships and inflates the search channels that close them. Worth connecting to this week's story: the channels that under-credit on last click are the same ones that harvested the holiday demand. If your reporting is last click, the channels that just delivered your cheapest new customers of the month are the ones your dashboard is quietly punishing. 

05 / Overall Channel Performance

Where the money goes, and THE TRUE COST OF A NEW CUSTOMER 

Meta's CPC ticked up about 4% this week, the auction pressure everyone expects from a holiday. It did not matter, because conversion rose five times faster than clicks got pricier. That is the cost lesson of a sale week: click prices are the wrong thing to watch. The number that decides whether the holiday was profitable is what a verified new customer cost you, and on every major channel except Google, that number went down. Last week's markup story holds too, ranging from 12% on Meta to 63% on Pinterest, so blended CAC flattered every one of these rows even more than usual. 

06 / New Customer Lifetime Value

What a new customer becomes over a year

One question worth asking about a sale week: are discount-driven buyers worth less over time? This grid cannot answer that yet, because these curves are built from cohorts acquired over the past year, not just this week. What it can tell you is the baseline to check against. Meta's holiday cohort came in at an $85 nCAC against a $110 one-year value benchmark, a thin margin that lives or dies on repeat purchase. If this week's cohort tracks below these curves at 30 and 90 days, the cheap holiday customers were not as cheap as they looked. Standard caveat: this grid blends brands at very different price points, so treat it as a directional market benchmark, not a promise for your store. 

07 / Conclusion 

Give the calendar its credit, then take it back

So, did Labor Day mean more sales or higher costs? More sales, cheaper new customers, and one search-shaped exception. Conversion rose nearly everywhere, nCAC fell on every major channel except Google, and the auction pressure that was supposed to make the holiday expensive never outran the buying mood.

The discipline is to log what actually happened. A holiday week that is not benchmarked as a holiday week becomes false evidence: proof the new creative works, proof the algorithm found its groove, proof you should scale into next week. Verify new versus repeat at the order level, tag the week for what it was, and judge next week against normal weeks. The brands that separate calendar effects from structural ones are the ones that scale the right thing when the holiday glow fades.

How this week's numbers were built. Aggregated across hundreds of Wicked Reports client accounts for the week of August 30 to September 05, 2026, except first click vs last click, which uses a rolling 90 day window. New versus repeat is verified at the order level against first party order IDs, not modeled and not surveyed. The new visit to new customer conversion rate credits the channel that originated the new visit. Channels without cost data, including email, SMS, organic, and influencer, are left out of the cost comparisons. Snapchat is excluded for negligible spend. Pinterest is marked with an asterisk because it ran on a small number of new customers this week, so it is not used to anchor any headline. The channel labeled Facebook in the underlying platform data is shown here as Meta. Charts and tables carry meaning through direction, labels, and contrast rather than color alone.