Black Friday provides a unique opportunity to drive significant revenue in a short period of time, but it also puts every aspect of your paid media strategy under pressure. Success relies less on last-minute tactics and more on thoughtful preparation that ensures campaigns remain efficient and scalable when demand peaks.
At DemandMore, we’ve helped ambitious DTC brands like Avon, Tech21, Optibac and Harmony turn this urgency into their most profitable period through smart planning and real-time control. The truth is simple: if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail.
We’ve also invited a couple of friends of the agency to share their own learnings from last year.
Preparing for Black Friday
Failing to prepare is the quickest route to wasted spend during peak. Before anything else, confirm what your promotional offers will be and ensure they are locked in early. This informs everything from messaging to bid strategy. Alongside this, stock availability must be monitored closely.
If key products risk selling out, campaigns need to adapt quickly by reducing investment or pausing spend to protect efficiency. When both offer strategy and inventory planning are in place, you’re in a far stronger position to scale confidently throughout Black Friday.
Review Last Year’s Performance
Take the learnings from last year into this year’s strategy:
- Which ad messaging performed best? Generic, benefit-focused, or price/promo-driven?
- What bids were needed to reach top positions?
- How did non-promotional campaigns perform?
- How much did spend increase, and were budgets a limiting factor?
- What trends followed Black Friday/Cyber Monday, and how should bids be adjusted afterward?
Define How You’ll React
Black Friday is unpredictable, and decisions often need to be made quickly. Rather than reacting in the moment, establish clear parameters in advance for how you’ll respond to pacing and performance.
For example, if you reach a large portion of your planned spend early but efficiency remains strong, will you continue to invest or scale back? By agreeing these thresholds upfront, including acceptable ROAS ranges, pacing tolerances, and actions based on stock levels, you remove uncertainty and enable faster, more confident decisions during peak trading.
Make Sure Your Campaigns Are Scalable
Peak performance relies on structures that can handle increased demand without breaking efficiency. Before entering Black Friday, ensure data collection and tracking are reliable so optimisation decisions can be made confidently.
Provide Google with strong audience signals and a well-maintained product feed to maximise machine-learning performance, particularly across Shopping and Performance Max.
Campaign structures should be consolidated enough to deliver consistent conversion volume, helping algorithms scale effectively under higher budget levels. Putting these foundations in place early allows spend to increase smoothly when demand rises.
Download Your Targets the Week Before Black Friday
Ahead of peak, export and store the ROAS or CPA targets used across each campaign.
Black Friday bidding often requires temporary adjustments to capture demand, but once the promotion ends, you’ll want to quickly restore your standard targets to avoid overspending.
Having everything saved in advance makes it simple to revert settings and return campaigns to their usual efficiency as soon as the sale period finishes.
Build Momentum Early to Capture Ready-to-Buy Shoppers
A top tip from George Frempong. Digital Specialist at F.H. Brundle and a friend of the agency, is to start your promotions early. By building anticipation in the week leading up to Black Friday, George and his team saw significantly higher engagement and lower-cost traffic, proving that early momentum can make a big difference.
That warm-up period is essential. It grows remarketing audiences while CPCs are still relatively manageable and it allows you to guide shoppers through the funnel before they are swamped with competitors.
Increase Your Budget Significantly
Search volumes can increase drastically; so should your budgets.
Ad Copy Changes
During Black Friday, customers are actively looking for offers, so your ads should make promotions immediately clear. Include promotional messaging directly in headlines and descriptions so users can quickly identify the value on offer.
Use promotion extensions and other eligible formats to highlight discounts consistently across every ad. This ensures that when intent is high, shoppers instantly recognise that your brand is part of the Black Friday sale.
During peak periods, customers are ready to buy, but they still want reassurance that they’re making the right decision quickly. Highlighting limited stock and using countdown timers can help encourage faster action, particularly when demand is high.
Directing users to best-selling products through sitelinks can also streamline their path to purchase, guiding them toward items more likely to convert. These tactics work together to reduce friction and drive stronger performance.
Keep Creative Bold, Clear and Consistent
During peak, subtle does not sell. One of the clearest learnings from last year, highlighted by George, is that bold, deal-forward creative performs significantly better than softer brand-led messaging.
High-contrast visuals and direct promotional headlines make it easier for shoppers to recognise value instantly and take action. Refresh seasonal creative ahead of time, ensure consistency across channels, and use urgency cues that support faster decision-making.
These tactics work because they reflect how customers buy when the window is short and competition is high. If someone cannot quickly understand what the offer is and why it matters, the click is likely to go elsewhere.
Tag and Organise Your Current Ads
Keeping your ads clearly labelled before Black Friday makes switching between promotional and business-as-usual activity far more efficient. Labelling BAU and Black Friday ads ensures teams can quickly activate and pause the right assets without confusion.
Including the year on Black Friday labels also prevents last year’s promotions from being mistakenly re-enabled. For Performance Max, using scheduled promotional copy within asset groups further reduces manual changes. A clear structure like this helps maintain accuracy and control during the busiest trading period.
Use Automated Rules to Manage Promotions
Automatic rules help ensure campaigns switch seamlessly between business-as-usual and promotional activity, without relying on manual changes at busy moments.
By scheduling when specific ads should pause or activate, teams can maintain accuracy and ensure offers go live and end exactly when intended. This reduces operational pressure during peak and provides greater control over how budgets are deployed throughout the promotional period.
Add Promotions to Shopping and Performance Max
To ensure customers can clearly see your Black Friday offers, set up promotions directly in Merchant Center. These can be applied sitewide or targeted to specific product groups depending on your discount strategy.
By making sure promotional tags appear within Shopping and Performance Max, your products will show alongside clear price advantages, helping you stay competitive when customers are actively comparing options.
Ensuring promotions are correctly implemented in advance removes the risk of missed visibility during the most valuable trading days.
Reflect Lower Prices in Your Shopping Ads
To ensure your promotional pricing appears correctly in Shopping ads, both the original and sale prices must be visible on the website and within your product feed. Products should also have been listed at their original price for a sufficient period before the promotion, as otherwise Google may not display the price-drop badge.
When a product is discounted but lacks sale indicators in the SERP, it becomes harder for customers to recognise the value, which can put you at a disadvantage against competitors who have prepared their feeds correctly
Update Your Feed More Frequently on Black Friday
Stock levels change rapidly during peak trading, and product feed updates need to keep pace. Increasing update frequency, ideally to hourly or via real-time syncing with a content API, helps ensure that ads stop serving when products sell out and new availability is reflected quickly.
This avoids wasted spend on unavailable items and protects the customer experience at a moment when reliability and clarity are essential.
Not Every Brand Needs Flashy Discounts
As Ryan Balani, Digital Marketing Manager at Bird & Blend Tea Co shared, some brands take a values led approach. His brand does not run big Black Friday promotions. Instead, they highlight evergreen bundles and gifting options that already deliver value.
The lesson here is that peak still matters even without a sale. You stay present, drive awareness and capture higher conversion rates naturally driven by gifting season demand.
It is a reminder that your Black Friday philosophy must always align with your brand.
What to Do After Black Friday
Once the promotional period ends, transition campaigns back to business-as-usual settings to maintain control over spend and efficiency. Reinstate your pre-peak ROAS or CPA targets, and consider tightening them temporarily to avoid overspending while demand normalises.
Pause Black Friday ads, reactivate BAU activity, and apply seasonality adjustments to help stabilise performance during the days following the sale. By managing this shift carefully, you protect profitability and prevent any unnecessary continuation of peak-level spend.
Final Thoughts
Black Friday shouldn’t feel unpredictable. When measurement, structure, messaging, and operations are in place ahead of time, your campaigns can scale smoothly and maintain strong performance throughout the entire black friday period.
The goal isn’t simply to achieve a temporary spike, it’s to maximise profitable revenue while setting your account up for continued success once peak is over. With the right preparation, you can approach Black Friday knowing your paid media is ready to deliver.