Planning seasonal promotions by watching rivals' calendars

What a promotion calendar records

For each rival, the calendar logs:

• When each promotion started and ended.
• What the offer was: discount, free delivery, gift with purchase, bundle.
• Which channels carried it: site banners, email, paid social, paid search.
• Which products or categories it covered.
• How it was worded.

The key moments for most UK shops are the late-November sales, the run-up to Christmas, January sales, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Easter, Father's Day and summer. Service firms have their own peaks: tax return deadlines for accountants, spring for landscapers, the start of the school year for tutors.

Public sources to watch

• Rivals' websites: homepage banners and sale pages, screenshotted with the date.
• Seed inbox: a dedicated business email address signed up to each rival, so you see when promotional emails start. Unsubscribe once your analysis is complete.
• The [Meta Ad Library](https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/): search a rival, filter by active or inactive ads, and note when each ad started running.
• The [Google Ads Transparency Center](https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/13733850): search an advertiser and filter by date and location to see which ads ran in a period.

If you automate any of this, respect each site's robots.txt and keep the load light. Never click rivals' paid ads to see them; use the transparency tools instead.

Read the patterns

Once a season's data is in, look for:

• Start dates. Whether rivals start their late-November sales early, and whether the first email lands before the first ad.
• Depth. Do they lead with a headline discount or with free delivery?
• Duration. Do sales extend, return, or end on time?
• Gaps. Are there moments when nobody is promoting?

Hypothetical example: a candle shop finds that all three rivals go quiet in early January, after the Christmas rush. That is a gap. A small, well-timed new-year promotion could stand out in an empty inbox, where a late-November sale would be one of many.

Plan your own, starting from margin

Do not copy a rival's discount without checking your own numbers. Their costs, margins and stock position are not yours, and a discount that suits a large rival clearing excess stock may lose you money on every order. Use our discount designer to test what an offer does to your margin, and the shipping threshold tool if free delivery is part of the plan.

Then decide where you want to compete and where you would rather not. Joining every sale is rarely necessary. A clear plan for three or four moments that suit your products is usually better than reacting to all of them.

Think about stock and capacity as well as price. A promotion that sells out of your best lines early, or swamps a small team with orders it cannot dispatch on time, can do more harm than missing the moment altogether. For service firms, the equivalent is booking more work than you can deliver well.

Keep the calendar going

The value grows over time. After a full year, you have a calendar of every rival's main moments and can plan your own campaigns, stock and email schedule well ahead. Our recipes for a rival promotion calendar and a seasonal offer comparison set out the steps.

A simple format for the calendar

The calendar does not need special software. A shared spreadsheet works well, with one row per promotion and these columns:

• Rival
• Promotion name or theme, in their words
• First seen and last seen dates
• Offer type and the headline wording
• Channels where you saw it
• Products or categories covered
• Link to the dated screenshot
• Your note: what you think it tells you

Keep the facts and the interpretation in separate columns. 'Sale banner first seen on the homepage on this date' is a fact. 'They seem to be clearing winter stock' is a guess, and should be labelled as one.

Keep the screenshots in one shared folder, named by rival and date, so anyone can check a row against its evidence. Review the calendar at the end of each season with whoever plans your marketing and stock. Ask three questions: what did rivals do that we did not expect, where were the gaps, and what would we do differently next time? Write the answers down, because by the same point next year nobody will remember them.

Service firms can use the same format. An accountant can log when rival firms start their self-assessment reminders, and a landscaper can log when rivals start promoting spring work. The moments differ, but the discipline is the same.

Next step

Promotions and retention is one of the eight categories an Intel loop compares across your site and up to three rivals you choose. A competitor website monitor and a competitor ad watch are both in build and not on sale.