Promotional Calendar

A promotional calendar lists every planned promotion with its dates: seasonal sales, event sales such as Black Friday, product launches with an offer, loyalty or members-only events, free-shipping weekends and email-only codes. For each one it records the products included, the mechanic (percentage off, gift with purchase, bundle, free shipping) and the channels that announce it.

Your own calendar is a plan. A competitor's calendar is a record: you rebuild it from the promotions, emails, ads and banners they actually ran, with dates. After a season or two, that record shows their habits, such as which week their summer sale starts or how many days before Black Friday their first ad appears.

Promotions are planned weeks ahead, so knowing when a competitor is likely to run one is more useful than seeing it on the day. If a competitor reliably starts its end-of-season sale the same week every year, you can decide in advance whether to go earlier, match it, or hold full price and spend on something else that week.

The calendar also exposes quiet periods. Weeks when your competitors are not promoting are where a smaller offer is more visible.

Timing claims need evidence. In RivalSweeper's Black Friday tracker (2025 season figures as published on the tracker, read November 1, 2026), 31 of the 64 tracked brands that advertised on Facebook and Instagram in November 2025 ran Black Friday or Cyber Monday ads. The earliest started 70 days before Black Friday; the median brand among those 31 waited until 11 days before. A single early competitor does not mean the whole market moved.

This example is hypothetical. A fashion brand records three competitors' promotions for a year. The record shows that one competitor opens a members-only sale about a week before its public sale every season, that another runs free-shipping weekends at the end of each quarter, and that the third has not discounted outside Black Friday all year.

Next year the brand plans its own end-of-season sale to open before the first competitor's members-only event, schedules a full-price product launch during a quarter-end free-shipping weekend it would rather not compete with, and treats any off-season discount from the third competitor as news worth a closer look.

1. Record every promotion with a start and end date. Note the mechanic, the depth and the products included.

2. Watch every channel that announces promotions. Homepage banners, email newsletters, ads and coupon codes often go live on different days, so one channel alone gives the wrong start date.

3. Compare each season with the same season last year. Habits only show up against the competitor's own history.

4. Keep it dated and sourced. RivalSweeper records competitors' promotions and coupon codes, homepage banners and marketing messages, the email newsletters they send their subscribers (and when), and their Meta and Google ads activity, each with a date. It checks each monitored site daily, so a new promotion is known within 48 hours.

5. Treat predictions as indications. RivalSweeper's move prediction, now rolling out, reads a competitor's own tracked history, such as promo timing, to suggest its likely next move with a confidence level; it is never a certainty.