Every July, the same conversation happens in marketing teams across the UK.
Traffic is down. Sales are slower. The pipeline looks thin. Someone presents a slide showing August is always like this. Someone else suggests pausing budget. The meeting ends with a decision to wait and see.
The brands that win Q4 didn't pause in July. They used it.
The summer slump is real, consumer attention genuinely shifts, purchase intent dips across most categories, and the metrics look worse than they did in May. But what also happens every summer, quietly and predictably, is that the advertising auction gets cheaper. Competitors pull back. CPMs drop. The inbox gets less crowded. Ad inventory that costs a premium in November is available at a significant discount in July and August.
The question isn't whether the summer slump exists. It's what you do with it. The brands that understand the seasonal mechanics of paid media use the quiet period to prepare for the expensive period, testing creative, building warm audiences, stress-testing landing pages, and entering Q4 with a proven playbook that their competitors are still writing from scratch in October.
Here's the actual state of the ad auction this summer and the testing agenda worth running while you have the window.
📊 PPC — THE SEASONAL AUCTION REALITY IN 2026
What's actually happening to CPCs and CPMs right now and what the data says about Q4
The broad "summer = cheaper CPCs" thesis is partially true and more complicated than most teams realise.
The honest picture from this year's data: Meta CPMs in 2026 rose significantly, one cross-brand analysis found a 172% increase from January to June across a large client portfolio, driven by Meta's structural cost inflation and seasonal pressure from back-to-school and Prime Day advertisers entering the auction in June and July. That makes right now — mid-July — a period where Meta costs are elevated relative to Q1, but lower than what's coming in Q4.
The Q4 numbers are the ones that matter for planning: Q4 CPMs average 26% higher than Q1, with Black Friday week seeing CPMs 2-3x normal levels. More specifically: Q4 sees 35-50% CPC increases due to holiday competition, and November's Black Friday window pushes costs to their annual peak. Q4 CPMs are 40-80% above baseline. Running cold-audience awareness campaigns in November is extremely expensive.
The opportunity in July and August, therefore, isn't a dramatic cost trough — it's a relative window. You're not going to see January's low costs. But you are operating in an environment where you can test creative at materially lower CPMs than you'll face in Q4, where the brands entering the auction in November are not yet competing for your inventory, and where mistakes are cheap relative to the cost of making those mistakes in October.
For Google Search, the picture is slightly different. Search CPCs remained remarkably flat through 2025 with negligible year-over-year growth, though a Q2 2026 spike has been noted in some European markets. Search tends to track intent more closely than Meta, which means summer dips in search volume directly reflect consumer behaviour rather than auction dynamics. Lower search CPC in summer is often a signal of lower purchase intent, not lower competition — an important distinction for how you allocate.
The specific creative testing opportunity is on Meta and TikTok. TikTok CPCs continue to run 40-50% cheaper than Facebook and 70% cheaper than Instagram — a significant efficiency advantage for top-of-funnel creative testing that costs relatively little to run regardless of season. The brands building creative libraries and audience warmth on TikTok in July are buying themselves a Q4 advantage that the brands ignoring it won't have.
CORE INSIGHT: The summer window isn't a cost holiday. It's a lower-stakes environment for the testing work that makes Q4 more efficient. <cite index="88-1">The brands that win Q4 are the ones that planned their creative pipeline and testing budget before October, not the ones scrambling in November.</cite> Every week of testing in July is a week of learning you enter Q4 with — at a fraction of the cost of learning during the most expensive advertising period of the year.
→ Takeaway: Pull your Q4 2025 creative performance data now. Which ads, which hooks, which offers produced the best ROAS last November? The summer agenda is to find this year's equivalents — by testing variations, new angles, and new formats while the auction is comparatively forgiving. The goal isn't conversions. It's a validated creative library ready for October.
🧪 STRATEGY — THE SUMMER TESTING PLAYBOOK
What to actually test in July and August and how to structure it
The summer window is most valuable if you treat it as a structured testing programme rather than a budget-conservation period. Here's the specific agenda:
Test 1: Creative angles. The single biggest lever in paid media is creative quality. Ads with relevance scores above 8/10 typically see 25-40% lower costs than average performers. Testing creative now - when each test costs less per impression - means you enter Q4 with proven performers rather than spending premium November CPMs to find out what works. The specific focus: test three to five different hooks for your core product or offer. Same product, different emotional angles. Which one earns the highest CTR and lowest CPA at low-stakes summer spend? That's your Q4 lead creative.
Test 2: Audience warm-up. The alternative to paying Q4 cold-audience acquisition costs is building warm audiences during lower-CPM periods (June-September) through organic content, video views, and lower-cost traffic campaigns — then converting those warm audiences in Q4 when retargeting costs less than prospecting at elevated CPMs. The retargeting audiences you build for £5-£8 CPM in August become the conversion-ready audiences you activate in October, before Q4 costs peak. This is the highest-ROI use of a reduced summer budget: running engagement and video-view campaigns at low cost to warm audiences you'll convert at high cost later.
Test 3: Landing page conversion rate. Lower traffic in summer makes it tempting to ignore conversion rate optimisation. It actually makes it cheaper: you're running experiments on a smaller audience with lower CPCs. A 0.5% conversion rate improvement that takes six weeks to validate in summer will compound across the significantly higher Q4 traffic volume. Run one landing page test per week in July and August. By October, you'll have a page that converts meaningfully better than your Q4 competitors who haven't touched theirs since last November.
Test 4: Email subject lines and send timing. Summer is statistically when email engagement changes — consumer behaviour shifts to mobile, reading patterns change, open windows move. Run a systematic subject line test on your most important nurture sequence. Specifically: test the same email with five different subject line approaches across the psychology types that work for your audience. The learning transfers directly to your Q4 campaign emails, at a fraction of the cost of testing with a Black Friday send.
Test 5: New channel exploration. Pinterest CPA in ecommerce averages $7-$8, the lowest of any social platform and purchase consideration windows of 21-30 days mean July audiences convert in September and October. Reddit's CPMs continue to sit well below Meta's. Building any meaningful understanding of these platforms now is cheaper and less risky than launching cold into a Q4 campaign.
CORE INSIGHT: The summer testing agenda is not a consolation prize for a slow period. It's a structural preparation programme for the most expensive weeks of the advertising year. Every test you complete in July is a variable you remove from the Q4 equation. The brands entering Black Friday week with five proven creative concepts, warm retargeting pools, and a 2% conversion rate page are competing from a completely different position than the ones who paused in August and scrambled in October.
→ Takeaway: Write the Q4 brief now. Not the campaigns — the questions. What do you need to know by 1 October to run the most efficient Q4 possible? Then build the summer testing agenda around answering those questions, in order of impact. Creative performance. Audience warmth. Landing page conversion. Email engagement. In that order.
📧 EMAIL — THE SUMMER LIST OPPORTUNITY
What slower summer traffic means for your email programme and how to use it
The summer slump changes the email environment in ways most brands don't plan for. Open rates often shift, mobile reading increases, open windows move to evenings and weekends, and the inbox competition from promotional email drops slightly as smaller brands reduce send frequency.
This creates two specific opportunities:
Re-engagement without the cost. Summer is the highest-ROI window for email list re-engagement campaigns. The cost of sending is fixed; what changes is the relative inbox competition and the audience's availability. A well-structured re-engagement sequence targeting subscribers who haven't opened in 90+ days performs better in July than in November, because you're not competing with Black Friday promotions for inbox attention, and because the subscriber who re-engages in summer is warmer going into Q4 than one you'd have to re-acquire from cold.
Nurture sequence optimisation. The welcome sequence, the post-purchase flow, the browse abandonment series — these are set up once and rarely revisited. Summer is when you have the bandwidth and the lower-stakes environment to audit and improve them. One study from Klaviyo found automated email flows drive 41% of ecommerce email revenue from just 5.3% of sends — a 15.9x revenue-per-email advantage over campaigns. The return on improving these sequences compounds every week they run. Fixing a low-converting welcome sequence in August means it runs better for the rest of the year, including the highest-volume periods.
CORE INSIGHT: Summer email isn't a slow period for email strategy. It's the window where the operational work that improves every future campaign gets done at low opportunity cost. The re-engagement campaign that takes three weeks to build and run in July is still active in November. The welcome sequence improvement you make in August compounds across the entire Q4 subscriber cohort. The time spent on email infrastructure in summer has a disproportionate return relative to the same effort spent in October.
→ Takeaway: Audit one automated email flow this week. Not a campaign, a sequence. Pick the one with the highest volume and the weakest engagement metrics. Run the subject line test, the CTA test, the email body length test. Three improvements to a high-volume automated flow produce compounding returns that a seasonal campaign can't match.
🔧 TOOL OF THE WEEK
Google Ads Creative Experiments (formerly Ad Variations): the underused testing tool that makes summer creative work rigorous rather than impressionistic.
Most teams run creative tests by launching new ads and comparing them informally. Creative Experiments runs a statistically controlled split test — same audience, same budget, same timeframe — and tells you with confidence whether creative A or B is actually performing better rather than relying on noise. The specific use this summer: set up a creative experiment for your Q4 hero product or offer. Test two hooks: your current best performer versus your most promising new angle. Run for four to six weeks at summer spend levels. By September, you have a statistically significant answer about which creative to scale into Black Friday.
The same principle applies on Meta through A/B testing in Ads Manager, but the Google implementation is often cleaner and more accessible for teams not running large Meta budgets.
YOUR ONE ACTION THIS WEEK
Write the Q4 brief. Test the first question.
Specifically: what is the single most important creative question you need answered before Black Friday? Is it which product hook converts best? Which audience responds to which angle? Whether video or static outperforms for your category?
Write it as a hypothesis: "We believe [creative approach A] will outperform [creative approach B] for [target audience] because [reason]. We'll know we're right if CTR exceeds [benchmark] and CPA stays below [target]."
Set it up as a paid test this week. Spend £200-500 on it at summer rates. The answer is worth multiples of that when you apply it at Q4 scale.
