What Black Friday and Cyber Monday taught us about smarter signals for 2026

TL;DR

BFCM looked great on the surface, but the numbers told a different story. High engagement didn’t always lead to revenue, and many teams realized they were optimizing toward activity, not intent. The real shift comes from using signals that actually reflect purchase behavior. With Signal Hub, brands can build smarter, higher-value audiences based on real spend and activate them across major channels, turning strong-looking campaigns into ones that truly drive business outcomes.

Another Black Friday and Cyber Monday is in the books.
Your dashboards are full, your spreadsheets overflowing, and your media team is somewhere between proud and exhausted.

Some campaigns crushed it. Others… not so much.

Every year, the same question comes up once the dust settles: what actually worked?

When success on paper doesn’t add up

If you judged your campaigns by click-through rates or installs, this season probably looked great. Engagement was high, creative was on point, and spend hit the targets.

But dig a little deeper, and many marketers are seeing the same thing: conversions that looked promising on paper didn’t translate to revenue. The signals were strong, but they weren’t the right ones. Or as some marketing leads told us after the season wrapped: “We reached everyone we wanted. Just not the ones who actually bought.”

That’s the paradox of modern performance marketing. You can have more data than ever, but if it’s all surface-level engagement, you’re still flying blind.

Picture this: your team spends weeks preparing a big November campaign. Budgets are locked, creatives polished, targeting refined. Launch day hits, and the metrics look great. But when you look at the business impact, something’s off. The audiences that engaged weren’t necessarily the ones who converted. You optimized toward activity, not intent, because your data stopped at digital behavior, such as surface-level signals like clicks, installs, and in-app events, which don’t reveal real purchase intent.

Building smarter audiences with the signals that matter

Now imagine building next year’s plan differently. Instead of targeting users  who clicked your ad or watched your video, you focus on people who actually spend, verified through real-world purchase signals.

That’s the idea behind Signal Hub, a new privacy-safe signal marketplace inside AppsFlyer, built for marketers. It enables brands to go beyond digital behavior and reach audiences based on their actual purchase transactions.

Here’s what that looks like in action.

Finding new high-value subscribers

A leading entertainment brand is launching a new streaming service and wants to acquire users with proven willingness to pay for content. Using Signal Hub’s purchase signals, the team identifies consumers who have recently spent on digital entertainment such as video, gaming, and music subscriptions across multiple merchants.

No first-party data is required. These are new potential users identified purely through anonymized, transaction-based spend data. Once built, the audience is activated across major ad platforms through AppsFlyer integrations, improving conversion rates and ROAS from the very first campaign.

Engaging high-value players

A mobile gaming publisher wants to re-engage existing players ahead of a new release.
Using first-party app data, the team identifies users who have installed or recently played one of their titles. Through Signal Hub’s financial data, they find which of those same users have also made recent app store purchases, indicating active, paying behavior in the wider mobile ecosystem.

By targeting that intersection, the publisher builds a segment of high-value, payment-active gamers and reaches them across channels with early-access or upgrade offers. The result: improved Day 7 ROAS and higher monetization from returning users.

From campaign reports to business outcomes

Signal Hub allows brands to enrich their first-party data with anonymized, transaction-based purchase signals securely and without moving or exposing any raw data.

Fully integrated into AppsFlyer’s ecosystem, Signal Hub lets teams activate and measure these enriched audiences across every major media channel without complex setup or engineering.

It’s a quiet but powerful shift: moving from campaign optimization to business optimization.

If you want to see how this works in practice and explore the full range of available signals, head to the Signal Hub page.

Key takeaways

Stepping back from the season, the pattern is pretty clear. The campaigns that truly performed weren’t just the ones that drove the most clicks or installs, but the ones built on signals that actually pointed to revenue. When you look at everything through that lens, a few things stand out:

• High engagement doesn’t guarantee revenue. Many campaigns performed well on paper but didn’t deliver business impact.
• Digital behavior isn’t enough. To find users who actually buy, you need signals rooted in real spending.
• Signal Hub makes that possible by using anonymized, transaction-based purchase data to build smarter, higher-value audiences.
• You can activate these enriched audiences across major media channels and measure real outcomes, not just clicks or installs.