Black Friday lands on Nov. 27 and Cyber Monday on Nov. 30 this year. For ecommerce teams running full-funnel Google and Meta accounts, the results are mostly decided before Thanksgiving. The order of operations is simple: fill the funnel in early November, give bidding room to capture demand during the week, and convert that same audience through December.
Before Nov. 27: fill the funnel
By Black Friday, every retailer in your category is bidding for the same shoppers. The accounts that win are the ones that started prospecting weeks earlier. Shoppers hold out for your best offers, and your job is to remind them they were looking and get them to purchase.
Ramp Meta prospecting budgets in small steps through early November. An ad set usually exits learning after about 50 results in the week after its last significant edit. Frequent budget changes can send it back into learning, and ad sets in learning are less stable with higher CPA. You don’t want to relearn during peak week.
Launch holiday creative before the week. Editing an ad set during learning resets it, so get Black Friday creative live days or weeks ahead. On Google, upload new holiday asset groups at least two weeks before the sale so they’re approved in time, and use asset group scheduling to switch them on when the sale starts.
Move Google targets now, not during peak. If you plan to lower ROAS targets to build volume, do it in early November and note where targets and budgets started so you can reset them in December.
Lock the offer and Merchant Center
Everything downstream depends on the offer. Merchant Center promotions can mark an offer for new customers, putting your sharpest deal in front of prospects, though it does not guarantee existing buyers won’t see it. A quick checklist we like:
- Use sale_price instead of overwriting price, so Google can show the strikethrough and sale badge. In the U.S. that requires a 5% to 90% discount and a regular price charged for at least five of the past 30 days.
- Match the sale price to your landing page and checkout. Mismatches get corrected or disapproved.
- Add a time and time zone to sale dates. Without one, Google uses UTC, which can start or end a Pacific brand’s sale at the wrong moment. Use a format like 2026-11-27T00:00-0800/2026-12-01T00:00-0800.
- Load promotions early. Google reviews every promotion before it shows.
During BFCM week: capture demand
Give Google room to spend. A campaign can spend up to two times its daily budget on a given day but no more than 30.4 times its average daily budget in a month, so don’t run out of room before Black Friday. Google’s budget recommendations flag campaigns at risk of stopping on busy days.
Tell Smart Bidding about the promo. Use a seasonality adjustment when you expect conversion rates to change by more than 30% in under seven days, and only on campaigns with conversion history. Base it on past results; if Black Friday converted at roughly double your November baseline, that is your input. For longer promos or smaller lifts, adjust ROAS targets manually and set them back afterward.
Keep prospecting running, but let harvest campaigns take the extra budget. Prospecting CPMs peak and branded search and retargeting convert cheaply. In accounts selling higher consideration products, shoppers who first came in through November prospecting often buy in December.
After Cyber Monday: convert the funnel
Retarget everyone who visited during BFCM week and left without buying. Lead with shipping deadlines, not deeper discounts. In the second week of December, order-before-shipping-cutoff urgency is one of the strongest messages of the season and keeps you from training shoppers to wait for the next markdown.
Reset bidding targets to pre-holiday levels and give it a few days before reacting to the usual overbidding. Then clean up: let sale price dates expire, end finished promotions, and pull countdown copy and time-limited assets from every campaign.
If you only do one thing this week, pull last year’s Black Friday conversion rate against your November baseline. It tells you whether a seasonality adjustment is worth setting and exactly what to set it to.
Source: Search Engine Journal
