Guest post by Meriem Nacer.
There’s a story that Black Friday got its name because it was the point in the year when retailers went from operating “in the red” to turning a profit and being “in the black”.
That’s not quite where the name came from, but it’s a useful way to think about Black Friday. Because generating more revenue isn’t much use if you’ve discounted away the profit to get it.
Black Friday falls on Friday 27 November this year, with Cyber Monday on the 30th, the final day of the month. If you work with monthly budgets, that puts one of your big spending days immediately before they reset. But your offer period almost certainly starts before Black Friday, and demand doesn’t disappear on 1 December either.
So the plan isn’t just how you scale into Black Friday. It’s what you’re promoting beforehand, what you’re holding back for the main event, how you manage December afterwards and what comes next.
Know what you can actually afford to discount
This is the one time of year when your ROAS can look fine while the business makes nothing.
A 4x return on a full-price product and a 4x return on the same product at 30% off are completely different outcomes. The dashboard shows the same number, but the margin behind it doesn’t. You don’t need sophisticated profit tracking to understand the impact. Knowing roughly where break-even ROAS sits at each discount level is a spreadsheet job.
Before November, you also need to understand the promotional plan from the client or internal team. What’s being discounted, by how much and when? If offers start early, what changes for Black Friday? Is anything being held back for Boxing Day or January? If everything is already at the maximum discount at the beginning of November, there’s nowhere for the offer to go when Black Friday arrives.
If you optimise towards profit rather than revenue, remember that margin data may be delayed through offline uploads or daily batches. Last year’s data becomes particularly useful here: which products actually made money, rather than simply generating the most revenue.
Returns matter too. Salesforce reported that 14% of global online purchases made during the 2025 holiday season were returned, with returns up 10% year on year. Because some of those returns won’t appear until later, November revenue can look healthier than the final result.
There may be clearance lines, overbought products or stock taking up warehouse space that the business would rather move, even at a thinner margin. Most sites offer around 20–30% off for Black Friday, while January clearance can reach 50%, 60% or even 70%, so shifting that stock while demand is higher and the discount is shallower may make more commercial sense.
That’s a merchandising decision rather than a paid media one, but PPC teams have the performance and demand data to help inform it.
Get your feeds and promotions ready before peak
This is the least interesting section here and one of the areas that causes the most damage when it hasn’t been done.
Before peak, check the basics properly:
- Titles: include useful product information such as size or quantity where relevant.
- GTINs & identifiers: check accuracy and coverage.
- Images & variants: make sure the right products, colours, sizes and options are represented properly.
- Product attributes: check product type, category, brand, colour, size, descriptions, variants.
- Custom labels: use them to identify things such as promo tier, margin band, stock depth, bestsellers and clearance products.
Footwear, homeware, apparel, I keep clicking Shopping ads badged with something like 30% off and landing on a full-price product. Applying a promotion broadly is easy. Scoping it properly to eligible products requires the feed work to have been done first. You’ve bought the click, broken the promise and given the shopper a very good reason not to trust the next ad they see from you.
If your tagging isn’t ready, there may be other options depending on the offer: a fixed-amount discount, free shipping or a genuine sale price within the feed. A strikethrough price on the right products is better than a percentage badge on the wrong ones.
How promotions work across the platforms
The mechanics aren’t the same everywhere.
“Black Friday” is not a start time. If the promotion starts at 00:01 but somebody manually switches an ad on at 9am, you’ve lost nine hours of one of your biggest trading days.
Write down the actual start and end times and check they agree across your ad account, Merchant Center, schedules and website. Anything manual needs a named person and a time.
Build the sale-ended version of every asset at the same time as the sale-live version, because nobody wants to be writing it at 11pm. And remember that organic outlives the promotion. Promotional social content can still be sitting on a profile in December unless somebody remembers to remove it.
On paid social, plan the funnel rather than just the offer. Awareness activity has a job before the promotion starts, and creative variety matters as targeting and delivery become increasingly automated.
Pinterest is particularly useful earlier in the journey because people use it to plan. Pinterest’s own testing found promotions delivered a 15% improvement in CPA and an 18% increase in conversion rate compared with the same ads without a promotion.
Start building your Black Friday audience early
A simple Black Friday sign-up page gives you somewhere useful to send early traffic rather than pushing everyone straight to products that aren’t discounted yet. It also gives you an audience of people who have actively told you they’re interested.
You’re building the CRM database ahead of peak, while from a PPC perspective those lists can be uploaded and used to build audiences across October and November. Track the sign-up as a secondary conversion, segment people by what they signed up for, and actually use that information when the promotion starts.
And actually email them. Building a Black Friday list and forgetting to tell those people the sale has started would be quite an achievement.
Veronica Ruiz Morcillo highlights using paid social to start building demand well before Black Friday:
“Black Friday doesn’t start when the sale does. Consumers are often researching and building wish lists weeks beforehand, so use paid social early to build warm, engaged audiences while CPMs are typically lower. Lead-gen campaigns offering early access, VIP treatment or exclusive content/limited editions can help build an audience ready to retarget (or email) when the sale goes live. And don’t forget to re-engage older audiences (180+ days) who showed interest but didn’t buy – put the brand and product back in their minds and onto their Black Friday wish list.”
As Veronica points out, the offer matters too. “Sign up for Black Friday” isn’t much of a reason to hand over an email address when everybody knows the sale will be public shortly afterwards. Early access, first access to limited stock or another genuine benefit gives people a reason to register without automatically giving away more margin.
This can work for lead generation and service businesses too. And the list is still yours in January.
Plan paid social and Shopping together
Paid social and Shopping shouldn’t be planned as if they exist in separate worlds. Search and Shopping are incredibly good at capturing existing demand, but someone still has to be searching. Paid social can introduce the offer, product or brand earlier and bring people into the funnel before that search happens.
Google’s research found that 70% of social media users use Google Search to inform and evaluate discoveries they made on social media.
Push the green version of a product through paid social and you can create demand for the green version.
But if “green” isn’t represented properly in the feed, the imagery doesn’t match what people saw on social or the product isn’t identifiable within your Shopping setup, you’ve created demand you’re poorly prepared to capture.
Look at search-query data alongside last year’s paid social activity and see whether there’s a pattern. If there is, sequence Q4 deliberately: decide what you’re going to push, then make sure Shopping is ready to capture it.
Someone may discover you through paid social, search later, click a Shopping ad and eventually convert through another channel. That’s why judging each platform entirely within its own reporting can give you a very strange view of what actually happened.
Check what can change without you
Before peak, check anything that can change the account without you:
- Automatically created assets
- Auto-applied recommendations
- URL expansion & text customisation
- Scripts and automated rules
- Third-party automation
- Scheduled Microsoft imports
During Q4, I’d be particularly careful with auto-applied recommendations. You’re making deliberate changes to budgets, bidding, creative and promotional activity based on a commercial plan that Google doesn’t necessarily know about. Having the system making its own changes at the same time can create problems very quickly.
Most practitioners I speak to or agencies I’ve collaborated with already have auto-apply switched off. If you leave any recommendations enabled, monitor the change history and have something in place to flag when Google makes a change.
AI Max is another one to check. If you’re using text customisation or Final URL Expansion, make sure you’re comfortable with the control you’re giving Google while promotional messaging is live, particularly if an offer only applies to specific products or landing pages.
Hannah Zora Strong also recommends checking your URL exclusions if you’re using Final URL Expansion:
“You may be tempted to enable Final URL Expansion to supercharge those sales. But advertiser beware, make sure you use the URL exclusions, where you can enter URLs to exclude and ‘URL contains’ to exclude, i.e. /blog, /careers or irrelevant category pages. You can’t tell the system which landing pages TO create ads for, but you can guide it by flagging URLs to NOT create ads for.”
And check scheduled Microsoft imports. They can overwrite campaign status, budgets and settings, so review or pause the schedule where necessary rather than assuming a manual change in Microsoft will stay that way.
Use the video you already have
PMax, Demand Gen and Microsoft PMax all create demand for video assets, while there may already be a library of proven creative sitting in your paid social accounts.
Pull the strongest paid social and organic videos before commissioning another pile of Black Friday creative. Check the aspect ratios you need, adapt them properly for different placements and identify the actual gaps from there.
It works both ways too. If a Demand Gen video performs well, test it through paid social. And for PMax, I’d rather supply video I actually want representing the brand than rely on the platform to generate something from the other assets.
You have more than you think, and November is a bad time to find out you don’t.
Don’t leave Microsoft until November
If you last looked at Microsoft Ads two years ago, it’s a different platform.
PMax has continued to develop, AI Max for Search is now available, and Microsoft is expanding advertising across Copilot with features such as Offer Highlights. New customer acquisition controls are also rolling out within PMax.
If Microsoft is going to be part of the plan, start testing it before November. There’s no point deciding during peak that you suddenly want another source of traffic and expecting a platform you’ve barely tested to tell you what works.
Agree your bidding and budgets before peak
Peak isn’t the time to decide what you’re willing to spend or what return you’re prepared to accept. If you expect to relax a tROAS or tCPA target to capture more demand, decide how far you’re prepared to go and agree it beforehand. The same applies to budgets.
There is one 2026 change worth knowing. From 17 August, Google changed how target-based bidding behaves for campaigns that are limited by budget. These campaigns should now optimise more consistently towards their stated tCPA or tROAS target when budgets change. If a limited-by-budget campaign has historically been outperforming its stated target, check what target is actually set before increasing the budget for peak.
Seasonality adjustments are designed for short, significant changes in conversion rate rather than an entire month-long Black Friday period. Google recommends them for events lasting around one to seven days and says they may be less effective beyond 14 days. Use last year’s conversion-rate change to inform the adjustment rather than what you hope happens this year.
I also wouldn’t restructure campaigns in the middle of October just because peak is coming. Fragmenting an account into separate campaigns for every promotion, margin band or product group can leave each campaign with less conversion data. Knowing that products have different margins or break-even ROAS doesn’t automatically mean they need separate campaigns.
Sophie Westall makes the case for scaling gradually:
“Start ramping budgets incrementally from the beginning of November, rather than making a big jump right before Black Friday. Around 20% at a time can be a useful rule of thumb, but the frequency should depend on the size of the account and budget.
I’d also use historical Black Friday data, search demand, impression share and performance metrics such as ROAS or CPA to guide how aggressively you scale.”
What actually matters on Black Friday
By the time Black Friday arrives, most of the important decisions should already have been made. What you don’t have yet is complete performance data. Cost data comes through quickly; conversion data doesn’t.
You’ll know you’ve spent the money long before you know exactly what that spend generated, and Google, paid social, analytics and your backend may all tell slightly different stories.
Agree before peak which number you’re actually being judged on and when the data is mature enough to judge it. Is it platform-reported revenue, analytics or backend revenue? How long does your normal conversion lag take?
On the day, I’d keep the monitoring relatively boring:
- Spend pacing against plan and whether you’re approaching a cap
- Feed and promotion status
- Disapprovals
- Stock levels on the products driving the most revenue
- Whether promotions in your ads actually match what’s on the website
Stock deserves particular attention. Bestsellers can sell out quickly, and there can be a delay between availability changing on your website and that change being reflected in the Merchant Center.
And agree who is actually allowed to change things. You don’t want four people looking at the account, seeing an uncomfortable number at 2pm and independently deciding to fix it.
Don’t forget what happens after Cyber Monday
Cyber Monday is the end of the promotion, not the end of Q4 demand. Don’t immediately drop November budgets back to October levels on 1 December when you’ve still got Christmas shopping and delivery cut-offs ahead of you.
If you relaxed a ROAS or CPA target for Black Friday, have a plan for putting it back. And if you used a seasonality adjustment for a short promotion, you don’t need a negative adjustment afterwards; once the event ends, Google stops applying it.
For smaller accounts, I’d also consider reviewing whether to exclude the Black Friday sale period afterwards. This isn’t what Google recommends data exclusions for – their guidance is to use them when there are issues with conversion tracking – but from a practitioner point of view, I’ve found it can help smaller accounts get back to normal faster when you’ve halved, or more than halved, the budget month on month.
You’re still trading towards the retailer’s Christmas delivery cut-off, once that passes you’re straight into Boxing Day, January sales or whatever promotional period comes next, often with a different offer, audience and commercial objective.
After Q4, write it down
Keep a record of the temporary changes you make along the way, because relaxed targets, increased budgets, promotional assets and automation changes have a habit of still being there in January.
Once Q4 is over, write down what actually happened while you can still remember it. Which products performed, which promotions caused problems, where you ran out of stock, what you scaled too slowly, what you scaled too quickly and what you wish you’d prepared earlier. Then use it when you start planning next year rather than having exactly the same conversations again. And then it’s time for the January seasonal audit. Paid advertising is never quiet.
None of this is particularly clever. That’s the point. The accounts that do well in peak aren’t the ones being managed hardest on the day. They’re the ones where the boring work was done six weeks earlier.
About the Author
Meriem Nacer is a senior paid media specialist who has been working in PPC since March 2010 and is the founder of 4M Digital, an independent paid media consultancy established in 2019. She works across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and paid social platforms including Meta, LinkedIn and Pinterest, supporting businesses, in-house teams and agencies with strategy, account management, training and white-label PPC support.
You’ll often find Meriem talking about Shopping, product feeds and the bits of PPC that tend to get left in the “someone else deals with that” pile, although she has a habit of diving into pretty much anything paid media when there’s an interesting problem to solve.
Alongside client work, Meriem mentors through Women in Tech SEO and founded Don’t Panic PPC, where she hosts regular Coffee Breaks, virtual coworking sessions and other events that bring PPCers together to talk through the realities of working in paid media, share knowledge and learn from one another.