Ramadan planning starts in Shaaban, not Ramadan

The clock on Ramadan media planning starts in Shaaban. If you are waiting for the crescent moon to brief your agency, lock your budget split, or book your influencers, you are already behind the brands that finished all three while everyone else was still checking the moon sighting news.

By the time Ramadan is officially confirmed, CPMs across Saudi Arabia have already started climbing. The brands that protect their reach this year are the ones who lock creative, offers, and budget pacing during the six weeks before the month begins, not during it.

Why CPMs climb once the month starts

Ramadan is the single biggest advertising event on the Saudi calendar. Every brand with a retail push, an app install target, or a seasonal offer wants a slice of the same feed in the same weeks. Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok auctions all work the same way. More advertisers bidding on the same inventory pushes the price of every impression up. It is common to see CPMs run two to three times higher during peak Ramadan weeks than in a normal month. That is not a platform glitch. It is the auction doing exactly what auctions do when demand spikes all at once.

The audience side compounds it. Screen time goes up during Ramadan, especially after iftar, when people are home, off work early, and scrolling more than usual. Sleep and work schedules shift, suhoor becomes a real daypart, and both social and TV consumption climb through the month. More eyeballs sounds like good news for advertisers, but the number of brands chasing those eyeballs grows faster than the inventory does, so the price per impression still goes up, not down.

The six-week Ramadan media planning calendar

Count backward from the first day of Ramadan and you get six weeks that matter, starting in early Shaaban. Each week has one job. Skip a week and you either end up paying full price for something you could have locked in cheap, or you launch mid-Ramadan with assets that were never properly tested.

Ramadan media planning in practice, week by week

• Week 6, early Shaaban: lock creative concepts and start production. Ramadan-specific creative needs real shoot or design time, not a re-skinned version of your everyday ads.
• Week 5: finalize the offer. Decide the promo mechanic, discount, bundle, or gift-with-purchase, and get sign-off before pricing teams get pulled into Ramadan operations.
• Week 4: set your budget pacing plan. Decide how much spend shifts from Shaaban into each Ramadan week, and how much you hold back for the run-up to Eid.
• Week 3: confirm influencer bookings and contracts. Good creators get booked out weeks ahead once every brand starts scrambling in late Shaaban.
• Week 2: push creative variants live on a short, low-spend test flight so you know what is working before CPMs peak.
• Week 1: move your final budget allocation, brief your team on daily monitoring, and confirm your Eid follow-through plan is ready before Ramadan even starts.

Pace the spend before the auction does it for you

Most brands make the same mistake. They run a flat daily budget through Shaaban, then panic-raise it once Ramadan starts and CPMs have already moved against them. Shift weight earlier instead. Spend more in the last two weeks of Shaaban, while inventory is still cheap, and use that window to build audiences and warm up retargeting pools your Ramadan campaigns can lean on.

Inside Ramadan itself, expect a second pacing shift around the middle of the month, when household spending moves from groceries and iftar toward clothing, gifts, and Eid preparation. If your budget does not move with that shift, you are still bidding for attention that has already moved on to a different purchase intent.

Do not stop when Ramadan does

Eid is not the finish line. It is the payoff. A large share of Ramadan-driven intent, gifting, new clothes, travel, converts in the days right around Eid, not during the fasting hours themselves. Brands that cut spend the moment Ramadan ends miss the highest-intent week on the whole calendar.

Keep retargeting live through the Eid holiday. Have a lighter creative refresh ready that swaps the Ramadan visual language for an Eid one, so you are not running iftar-themed ads during Eid week. Hold back a slice of your original budget specifically for this window instead of spending it all before the 25th of Ramadan.

Six weeks feels like a long runway in Shaaban and painfully short once Ramadan actually starts. Plan by the week, not by the moon sighting, and you are still buying reach at a price that makes sense while everyone else is paying triple for the same feed.