Annual Black Friday is a huge consumer event each year. While shoppers increase their spending by over 60%, the winners among brands are those who have carefully planned ahead. Powering their activity with paid media. From spending money on Google Ads, Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), to other paid channels, winning during this high time comes down to early preparation, responsiveness, and separating yourself from competitors.

Below is a step-by-step approach I have made to guide you to success.

Setting your objectives and timing

Start by planning your black friday objectives, do you aim to make money, get rid of stock, enhance customer acquisition, or grow average order value? A specific objective keeps your decisions focused and measurable.

Set up your key dates. Black Friday is the fourth Friday in November, but consumers begin shopping sooner. Budget a campaign window that starts on the prior Monday and runs through Cyber Monday or longer. Set up your phases:

• Teaser phase: To build suspense e.g, “Black Friday deals are coming”
• Main event phase: Hammering advertisements from Black Friday to Cyber Monday
• Post-event phase: Retarget people who engaged but didn’t convert

Every step requires its own creative and strategic solution.

Audit and refresh creative assets

A solid beginning is to revive top-performing asset combinations from previous campaigns to prevent reinventing the wheel.

Creative themes to utilise –

• Customers prefer urgency and immediacy “limited-time offer” or “while stocks last” kind of messages.
• Savings need to be made explicit r.g percent saving, price cuts, bundle offers.
• Use bold, crisp design that’s new-looking and aligns with your brand.
• Sizes and formats matter
• For Google: configure responsive display ads, image ads, and video ads (YouTube).
• For Meta: ensure you have optimised formats (square and portrait) for Reels and Stories, and regular feeds too.
• Have several variants to test in each phase.

Optimising your Google Ads strategy

Search campaigns:

Target high-intent searches such as “Black Friday TVs” or “cheap winter coats Black Friday” using exact match. You can also add dynamic search ads to cover more ground if your product list is extensive.

Increase budgets on top-converting ad groups in the period immediately prior to and including Black Friday. Employ ad extensions generously sitelinks, structured snippets, callouts like “Free next-day delivery.”

Shopping campaigns:

Make sure your product feed is fresh and correct—prices, stock, promotions. Use Merchant Promotions to bring deal messaging into shopping ads directly.

Split your shopping campaigns into top performers, promotions, and rest of feed to budget accordingly.

Display and YouTube:

Use custom intent audiences to reach out to people looking for similar deals.

Consider YouTube bumper ads or skippable ads scheduled to pick up traffic during the night shopping peak. Create remarketing lists early. Tag visitors from your site, as well as viewers who viewed your ads but didn’t convert.

Budget pacing:

Utilise automated bidding strategies such as Target ROAS or Maximise Conversions, but monitor closely, as performance can be volatile during peak trading windows

Set day parting optimisations for peak traffic hours. Black Friday morning, lunchtime and evening are peak periods.

Meta advertising strategising (Facebook and Instagram)

Campaign structure

Begin with awareness or reach campaigns in the teaser phase to build anticipation.

Toggle into conversion-driven campaigns through the sale window, utilising the Conversion objective.

Audience setup

Retarget all your previous week’s site visitors and early engagers.

Target lookalike audiences of your best-value customers, especially those who converted last year’s Black Fridays.

Layer interests around your product categories, but not way too broad targeting. Target high-intent behaviors like “engaged shoppers.”

Creative and placements

Heavy use of stories and reels they are often cheaper and work well.

Refresh your creativity rapidly, ads fatigue quickly during peak shopping periods.

Apply countdown stickers (on Stories) or overlaid blank text like “Starts Friday.”

Dynamic ads for a broad audience

For e-commerce, drive product recommendations with dynamic ads—refresh your catalogue with most recent sale prices to show promotion messaging.

Bidding and budgets:

Consider utilising “Campaign Budget Optimisation” (CBO) so Facebook can allocate spend to top-performing ad sets.

Opt for “Highest Value” as conversion optimisation if that aligns with your goals.

Raise budgets in increments. A one-time increase might raise costs dramatically on volume and competition.

Backfill with other paying channels

Influencer amplification

Partner with micro-influencers who have audiences similar to your product.

Give them early access or promo codes to create anticipation for offers to follow.

Affiliate marketing

Ensure your affiliate partners are ready with exclusive offers or banners to be triggered.

Offer tiered commission rewards for affiliates that drive more volume through your Black Friday window.

Programmatic and native advertising

Apply programmatic DSPs to retarget throughout the open web.

Native advertising (e.g., Taboola) may be employed to drive additional awareness of teaser content or blog articles.

Connected TV (CTV)

Look into advertising short OTT spots if your merchandise is suitable for a broad demographic.

Make advertisements short, prominent, and air during night viewing hours when viewership is high.

Cross-channel coordination

Maintain the same theme across all channels. Regardless of whether the angle is “40 percent off sitewide” or “free express shipping”, be consistent.

Maintain a visual tag or design element that unifies ads across all platforms, this creates recognition across channels.

Alignment of landing pages

When consumers click, they must be taken to pages offering identical promotions and urgency.

Use sale banners at the top of landing pages; tidy UX; and clear CTAs like “Buy now, sale ends midnight”.

UTM tagging and measurement

Set clear UTM parameters on all campaigns to be able to break down channel (google, fb), campaign phase (teaser, main, post), and creative grouping.

Make sure your analytics setup (Google Analytics or equivalent) passes back conversions along the full funnel.

Monitoring and real-time optimisation

Before launch

Make final pixel checks, conversion tracking, product feed quality, ad status and landing pages.

During the campaign

Monitor performance hourly during high-traffic times.

Monitor top metrics such as click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend.

Stop or shift budget from poorly performing creatives, bids or placements promptly.

Immediately after Black Friday

Slice your data channel, creative, audience, and product.

Ask: What products worked best? What creative work best on a conversion basis? Which channel produced the best ROI?

Enact learnings across Cyber Monday and holiday spend in December.

Bouncing back and retaining customers

Follow-up campaigns:

Launch retargeting campaigns on Social and Google Display to shoppers who visited but did not buy during the promotion.

Send reminder emails with “Thank you for your interest” or “New deals launching soon.”

Loyalty opportunities:

Give pre-December VIP customers early access to future December sales.

Encourage post-Black Friday buying with bundling, gift cards, or rewards to return.

Review and document learnings

Do a post-mortem with your team: what worked, what didn’t, and where expectations vs. outcomes diverged?

Document creative, bidding, audience, schedule and funnel insights.

Save top performers (creative and copy) as assets for next year.

Make a checklist for planning next year, such as launch reminders, creative deadlines, feed deadlines, etc.

Timeline

• Planning and objectives – Set goals, define campaign phases, outline calendar
• Creative preparation – Refresh assets, prepare responsive formats and multiple variants
• Google Ads – Tweaking search, shopping, display and YouTube ads; set bids and budgets
• Meta Ads
• Plan campaigns, target segments, use dynamic ads, budget optimise
• Other channels
• Use influencers, affiliates, programmatic, CTV where relevant
• Cross-channel Sync
• Synchronise messaging, imagery and landing pages by channel
• Monitoring
• Track in real-time, adjust bids and budgets quickly
• Post-event engagement
• Retarget, follow up with customers, drive loyalty programmes
• Review and documentation
• Review outcome, save learnings, plan campaigns next year

Summary

Black Friday is more educated than ever, and users know how to shop for the best deals and available offers throughout this period, pre-advertising and also running tactile advertising throughout November will allow you to become a focal point within your industry for the event. Demand picks up early and will continue throughout the month.

There’s no one size fits all, but by aligning goals, creative, channels and operations upfront, your team can drive better performance. When the clock strikes midnight on Black Friday, you won’t just be accommodating demand, you’ll be capturing it.

If you’d like any section elaborated, examples added, or to see a version based on real data or creative inspiration, I’d be happy to help sharpen further.

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