Black Friday & Cyber Monday (BFCM) are the Super Bowl of eCommerce. For Dive Right in Scuba, 2024 was their best year ever, so the 2025 goal was simple to say and hard to execute.

Beat a record year. During the most competitive shopping weekend of the year.

Spoiler: we did. December 2025 exceeded expectations and proved to be their best December in company history.

The challenge

After an all-time performance in 2024, BFCM 2025 came with a new problem:
expectations.

Costs rise, competition gets louder, and “just do what we did last year” rarely works, because everyone else is also doing it.

The good news was that Dive Right in Scuba ran a strong BFCM offer, and a great offer always does some of the lifting.

Our job was to make sure it lifted efficiently by matching budgets, bidding behavior, and messaging to peak-season shopping intent.

Our Objectives were:

• Drive a new all-time-high BFCM revenue weekend
  Grow new AND returning customers
• Stay efficient while competition peaks
• Keep messaging fresh, relevant, and promo-ready across channels the entire weekend

The approach (and why it worked)

1) Leaned into seasonality, not vibes

We used seasonality adjustments in Google Ads to better align bidding behavior with the predictable reality of BFCM demand spikes (aka: when conversion rates don’t behave like a normal Friday in October).

Result: we stayed competitive at the exact moments shoppers were most ready to buy, without blindly inflating spend.

2) Kept ad copy “BFCM-current” at all times

During BFCM, stale ad copy is expensive. We kept messaging tightly synced to the moment:

• Promo-forward headlines and descriptions
• Offer framing that matched the shopper mindset
• Consistent language across all placements so customers didn’t feel a disconnect mid-click

3) Put the right budget behind the right intent

Instead of treating platforms equally, we treated them strategically:

• Increased pressure where demand capture is strongest
• Reduced spend where it wasn’t pulling its weight
• Stayed nearly flat on total ad spend overall, while still scaling revenue (the best kind of scaling)

We didn’t chase volume. We chased timing, intent, and relevance.

4) Leveraged past buyers like a cheat code (the ethical kind)

BFCM isn’t only the prospecting season, it’s also the “welcome back” season.
We leaned into past-buyer momentum with:

• Customer-based targeting/remarketing approaches
• Messaging designed for returning customers (different urgency, different trust level)
• Smarter segmentation so we weren’t wasting bids re-convincing people who were already convinced

5) Video assets that did the heavy lifting (credit where it’s due)

Dive Right in Scuba brought strong video creatives (seriously, shoutout to their team!).

We didn’t just post the videos and hope for the best. We plugged DRIS’s creative into the right moments of the funnel, so it did a job: build confidence, reinforce the offer, and drive the click that converts.

Results (BFCM 2025 vs. BFCM 2024)

Revenue & efficiency

• +31.4% total revenue year-over-year
• +24.6% online revenue
• Phone revenue: +1,108% (11×+) – yes, really
• Total ad spend: essentially flat (+0.01%)
• Blended ROAS: +31.4% (more revenue with the same overall spend is the dream)

Customer growth

• +12.1% total customers
• +10.5% new customers
• +14.1% returning customers

In other words: we didn’t “buy” growth by throwing money at the problem – we reallocated, stayed sharp, and let the strategy do the lifting.

2024 set the bar. 2025 cleared it with fins on. Which means BFCM 2026 is now officially under pressure . . . and we’re totally fine with that.

If your idea of a good time involves neoprene and a dive computer, do yourself a favor and check out Dive Right In Scuba.