Black Friday 2025: Record-Breaking Sales Powered by AI and Ad Spend

The good news: U.S. consumers spent a record $11.8 billion online during Black Friday, up 9.1% from 2024. AI-driven traffic to retail sites surged 805% as tools like Amazon’s Rufus and Walmart’s Sparky helped shoppers compare prices and discover deals faster. Adobe projects Cyber Monday will hit $14.2 billion, making it the largest online shopping day of the year.

The flip side: Each year brings more promotional events, longer deal windows, and bigger spending numbers. That means more competition fighting for the same consumers. The opportunity is still massive, but capturing share efficiently requires more precision than ever.

We dug into exclusive retail media performance data based on ad spend in the Skai platfrom during Black Friday to find out what marketers got right and what you can learn from it. Real campaign results from brands managing spend across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other major networks revealed which strategies drove efficient growth and which ones just burned budget. More importantly, what can you, the marketer, use to drive incremental ROI in the critical weeks ahead and into 2026?

Three clear patterns emerged: high engagement validated strategic spending, Amazon DSP is becoming the most critical lever in retail media, and category timing separates winners from those who let opportunities slip away.

Three patterns that defined Black Friday performance

When spend hits the mark, engagement follows

Across Amazon Ads overall, spend increased by 12.4%, while clicks surged by 22% and CPCs dropped by nearly 8%. Amazon DSP clicks jumped 186% year-over-year. This level of efficiency doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of sophisticated programmatic strategies that found and captured latent demand at precisely the right moments.

In one of the most competitive shopping windows of the year, efficiency improved as scale increased. 

That’s rare.

This particularly matters now because the promotional calendar has fundamentally changed. It now includes three to four major events stretching across longer windows (July’s Prime Day being a prime example). This shift means advertisers need to be more strategic about when and how they invest, capturing demand as it surfaces rather than waiting for single concentrated moments.

The implication? You can’t rely on event-driven demand spikes alone anymore. Precision targeting that captures demand whenever and wherever it surfaces has become essential.

Marketer insight: Black Friday 2025 rewarded advertisers who used data to capture demand at the exact right moment, not those who simply outspent competitors during peak hours. With promotional windows getting longer and more frequent, this focus on efficiency will only become more important heading into 2026.

Amazon DSP is fast becoming retail media’s most important lever

Based on Black Friday results and both 2025 Prime Days, Amazon DSP is rapidly becoming the most important card to play in retail media besides Sponsored Products. And the ceiling is enormous.

DSP spend increased 32% year-over-year, while clicks surged 186%. This marks the third consecutive major shopping event where DSP significantly outperformed other channels, with the engagement-to-spend ratio dramatically better than other Amazon Ads options.

Three straight tentpole events with outsized engagement growth isn’t luck; it’s confirmation that retail media marketers have recognized DSP’s strategic importance and are refining their approaches accordingly.

Here’s why the upside is so massive: DSP isn’t limited to Amazon domains. Commerce signals (what consumers browse, add to cart, purchase, and subscribe to within retail environments) represent one of the most powerful datasets available to marketers. This behavioral data reflects actual shopping intent, not just general browsing behavior or demographic assumptions.

When you can take those commerce signals and activate them programmatically across the open web, you’re no longer constrained by a single retailer’s traffic. You’re reaching high-intent shoppers wherever they spend time online, using purchase behavior to inform targeting rather than relying on cookies or probabilistic audience models.

The 186% click growth tells us advertisers aren’t just retargeting cart abandoners anymore. They’re using DSP for full-funnel strategies: building awareness through display when shoppers are in early research mode; capturing mid-funnel consideration as they evaluate options;  and connecting upper-funnel brand investment directly to lower-funnel conversion in ways that pure Sponsored Product campaigns cannot achieve.

Marketer insight: If you’re still treating DSP as a nice-to-have or relegating it to small test budgets, you’re leaving significant growth on the table. The brands refining their programmatic strategies across three consecutive tentpole events are seeing compounding returns. DSP has become critical to retail media success, and its importance is growing every quarter.

Essentials led again, but Electronics didn’t let the opportunity slip away

• Health: +16.4%
• Beauty & Personal Care: +9.0%
• Food & Groceries: +8.8%
• Family & Community: +8.8%

Essentials performed consistently strong, just as they did during both 2025 Prime Day events. These categories benefit from steady, continuous demand rather than event-driven spikes. Consumers need these products regardless of sales events, so maintaining consistent presence pays off across all shopping moments.

But one category dramatically outperformed during Black Friday despite barely registering during Prime Days: Computers & Consumer Electronics grew 20.7% year-over-year to lead all categories. For context, this category didn’t even crack the top five during either Prime Day event in 2025.

What changed? Electronics advertisers recognized Black Friday’s unique position in consumer psychology and didn’t let the opportunity slip through their fingers.

Black Friday has always been “electronics day” in the American shopping mindset. Consumers expect deep discounts on TVs, gaming consoles, computers, and gadgets. Hot sellers included LEGO sets, Pokémon cards, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5 consoles, Apple AirPods, and KitchenAid mixers. Adobe projected electronics would see the deepest Cyber Monday discounts at 30% off list prices.

The brands that won understood this consumer expectation and aligned three critical elements: promotional depth that met anticipated discount levels, inventory positioning to support demand, and media investment scaled to ensure visibility during peak shopping hours.

During Prime Days, these same advertisers likely held back, correctly recognizing that consumer mindset wasn’t as primed for big-ticket electronics purchases. Prime Day has established itself as a day for deals across many categories, but it lacks the specific electronics association that Black Friday carries.

This reveals something crucial about modern retail media strategy: success isn’t about showing up to every sales event with equal budget allocation. It’s about understanding your category’s natural demand rhythms within the broader promotional calendar and committing fully when consumer intent is already high.

Marketer insight: Audit your category’s demand patterns across the full sales calendar. Don’t default to equal budget distribution just because an event exists. Identify where your category has inherent consumer intent, align promotional depth with media investment, and be willing to pull back during periods where demand isn’t naturally primed, even if competitors are active. In a promo-saturated environment, strategic absence can be as important as strategic presence.

You still have three weeks to execute

Black Friday is over, but the final push to Christmas still represents a massive opportunity for holiday revenue. These final weeks reward precision over budget size.

The right platform makes execution possible. Skai features that can help you finish strong include:

• Budget Pacing. Automatically distribute spend across the remaining weeks to hit targets without burning out early or leaving budget on the table during peak conversion periods.
• Portfolio Bidding. Optimize bids across multiple campaigns simultaneously to maximize efficiency while maintaining performance goals during high-competition windows.
• Performance Alerts. Get real-time notifications when campaigns drift from targets so you can react immediately to competition shifts or inventory changes.
• Incrementality. Measure true lift from your retail media investment to understand what’s actually driving sales versus what would have happened anyway, which is critical when budgets are tight.
• Digital Shelf Intelligence. Monitor product availability, pricing, and competitive positioning across retailers to align media investment with where you can actually convert demand.

Conclusion: Keep executing into January

Consumers have extended holiday shopping and purchases into mid-January as they exchange and return gifts, buy accessories for their holiday gifts, and pull the trigger on items they didn’t purchase in Q4. The brands that apply these insights by prioritizing engagement metrics, leaning heavily into programmatic channels like Amazon DSP, strategically timing category pushes rather than spreading budget equally, and recognizing that promotional saturation changes the rules will capture disproportionate share throughout the holiday period.

Skai’s Retail Media solutions enable marketers to plan, activate, and measure campaigns across 300+ retailers and publishers (including Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Instacart) as part of a broader commerce media strategy. AI-powered pacing, programmatic intelligence, and audience segmentation tools help teams maximize engagement, efficiently capture demand, and tie spend to sales with confidence even as the promotional landscape becomes more complex.

Ready to finish Q4 strong? Schedule a quick demo to see how Skai helps execute on these insights before the holiday window closes.

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