Benchmarks / How customers hear about you at BFCM
What customers answered to “How did you hear about us?” at BFCM, compared with each brand’s own October
Fairing Data Team · Published October 2026 · Updated November 2026 · How we measured
At BFCM, a bigger share of customers name friends or family (often called word of mouth) when you ask how they heard about you. At the median brand, that share rose 4.6 percentage points over its own October, and it kept rising after Cyber Monday to peak in the week of December 6 to 12.
Your ad reports miss much of that shift. Most customers who name friends or family arrive with no UTM tag, and at BFCM a bigger share of the revenue your paid-search ads get credit for comes from them. Discount codes cover less as well. A smaller share of BFCM orders uses a code, so code reports likely miss more influencer sales.
These figures come from customers’ answers to “How did you hear about us?” after checkout (see our HDYHAU survey setup guide). For order volume, pacing and timing, see our Black Friday statistics and benchmarks.
How to read the data
Median brand, own October. Figures are for the median (typical) brand, with half of brands above it and half below. Each change compares a brand with its own October first, then takes the median.
Percentage points. A share going from 15% to 20% is up 5 percentage points (“points” for short).
Daily pace (“x”). “1.0x” means the same daily pace as the October average, and “5.1x” means 5.1 times it.
Window. BFCM means Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday.
At the median brand, friends and family ran 5.1x their October daily pace over BFCM, compared with 3.8x for all channels at the same brands. So their share rose 4.6 percentage points over the brand’s own October, more than any other channel, mostly among first-time customers.
Each bar is a channel’s average daily pace from last BFCM (Nov 27 to Dec 1), as a multiple of its own October daily average, median brand. The tick on each bar is all channels at the same brands, so a bar past its tick grew faster than the channels overall.
Email and text also ran a little ahead of all channels (4.2x). Influencer, YouTube and podcast ran a little slower, so their small shares barely moved.
Friends and family grew faster at BFCM, so social’s share fell even as its daily pace ran 3.3x October’s
At the median brand, social’s share fell about 3 percentage points from its own October. For more on social channels, see our Social Channel Benchmarks.
The same friends-and-family rise showed up at each of the last three BFCMs, so you can plan for it
The median brand’s share rose 4.6, 4.7 and 4.6 percentage points over its own October in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Median brand’s change in its friends-and-family share, BFCM vs its own October, for each of the last three seasons.
The friends-and-family share keeps rising after BFCM and peaks in the week of December 6 to 12
At the median brand, the share starts climbing in early November and peaks about 7 points above its own October, higher than over BFCM itself. Brands with a visible referral program saw about the same BFCM rise as brands without one, so referral programs don’t explain it.
Median brand’s weekly change in friends-and-family share, in points above its own October share (brands with 100+ October answers and 30+ answers that week).
At BFCM, the friends-and-family share rose most at apparel brands and least at food and drug brands
The share rose in every category we can show.
| Category | Friends-and-family share, BFCM vs own October |
|---|---|
| Apparel and accessories | +8.0 percentage points |
| Housewares and home | +4.0 percentage points |
| Health and beauty | +3.9 percentage points |
| Food and drug | +2.4 percentage points |
Median brand in each category. Brands choose their own category, so labels are self-reported. Other categories have too few brands to list.
BFCM first-time buyers who named friends or family come back even less than other BFCM first-time buyers
BFCM first-time buyers reorder about 30% less often than October’s within 90 days, and those who named friends or family about 40% less often. Six months on, they still trailed the brand’s other BFCM first-time buyers by about 1.5 percentage points, about the same as at 12 months, and spent about 18% less after their first order. October’s friend-referred buyers showed no such gap.
How to plan for BFCM 2026
Run any referral or gifting push from early November through mid-December, when a bigger share of customers already name friends or family. Compare your own BFCM rise with your category’s in the table above.
Judge each channel by its daily pace against its own October, not by its share. Apart from friends and family and email or text, the channels we show ran 3.0x to 3.6x their October daily average over BFCM, so look into any channel that ran well below that.
Forecast slightly lower reorders from BFCM first-time buyers who named friends or family. Use your own BFCM first-time buyers to size the difference.
A last-click report gives the sale to the ad a customer clicked just before buying, and a survey answer records how they first heard about you. A customer can hear about you from a friend, then click a search ad, and your paid-search report counts the sale. Both can be true, so the survey shows what your ad report misses, not what the ad added.
At BFCM, a bigger share of paid-search revenue came from buyers who named friends or family
That share rose 2 points or more at 7 in 10 brands. At the median brand, about 27% of the BFCM revenue credited to paid search came from buyers who named friends or family, up about 5 percentage points from its own October.
Looked at the other way: about 1 in 7 BFCM customers who named friends or family arrived through a paid-search click, so your paid-search report claims some of your friends-and-family customers. And at the median brand, about two-thirds of them arrived with no UTM tag at all, about the same as in October. Someone who hears your name from a friend can just type it in.
At BFCM, an even smaller share of paid-search revenue came from buyers who named search
That share fell 2 points or more at almost half of brands. At the median brand, only about 9% of the BFCM revenue credited to paid search came from buyers who named search, about 2 percentage points less than in its own October. “Named search” includes paid and organic search answers, since most brands’ answer options don’t separate them.
At BFCM, a smaller share of paid-social revenue came from buyers who named a social platform
That share fell 2 points or more at 7 in 10 brands. At the median brand, about 71% of the BFCM revenue credited to paid social still came from buyers who named a social platform, about 5 percentage points less than in its own October.
This measure is generous. A dollar counts if the buyer named any social platform, so a buyer who clicked a paid Instagram ad after seeing an organic TikTok post still counts. If anything, it understates how often paid-social credit and what customers say disagree.
How to plan for BFCM 2026
Put what each ad channel gets credit for next to what its customers said, in October and over BFCM, and check your shares against the median brand’s above. To pull last year’s answers by UTM source and medium, ask the Fairing MCP (it lets an AI assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT query your Fairing data).
When untagged orders jump at BFCM, check how many of those customers named friends or family. Credit the jump to a channel only after that.
Fairing asks every customer how they heard about you after checkout, so you can see which sales your ads get credit for that started with a friend, a podcast or a post.
At the median brand, the share of survey-answered orders with a discount code fell about 7 percentage points from its own October. Code use fell for customers from every channel we measured, so the drop isn’t only a shift toward channels that rarely use codes.
One likely reason is that many stores run their BFCM offer as an automatic discount, which applies without a code. Our data records only typed codes, so we can’t measure how much that explains.
At BFCM, code reports likely catch a smaller share of the customers who name an influencer
At the median brand, customers who named an influencer were about 4 to 5 percentage points less likely to use any discount code over BFCM than in October, counting every typed code, including sitewide BFCM codes, not only the influencer’s own. Even in October, more than 4 in 10 of them used no code at all.
The influencer share barely moved, at about 3.3% in both October and BFCM, so fewer codes didn’t mean fewer influencer customers.
Survey answers hold up where codes don’t. Over BFCM, the share of first-time customers who answered the survey fell only about 2 percentage points from the median brand’s own October, so the survey still shows who sent the buyers your code report misses.
How to plan for BFCM 2026
Judge influencers on survey answers as well as BFCM code redemptions, since many of their customers never type a code. See how to measure influencer sales beyond codes.
Add your top influencers and podcasts as answer options before BFCM, so customers can name them even when they skip a code.
Put your post-purchase survey live now, so you have normal weeks to compare BFCM with.
About the data
Who’s in it. Shopify and ecommerce brands running Fairing’s HDYHAU survey (“How did you hear about us?”) with at least 100 answers in both October and BFCM 2025.
How we measure. Every change compares a brand with its own October 2025 (October 1 to 31), then takes the median across brands. BFCM is Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, November 27 to December 1, 2025.
Limits. Figures cover customers who answered the survey, and people who answer can differ from people who don’t.
