Black Friday PPC campaigns: example structures and how to set up yours
The best Black Friday PPC campaigns are usually decided with lots of planning. From the structure to the feed and audiences behind them. The good news is Black Friday falls on 27 November this year and Cyber Monday on 30 November, so there is still time to get most of this in place.
This guide covers the Black Friday PPC campaign structures our paid media team uses for Search and Shopping, the settings to change beforehand and a pre-launch checklist.
Decide what peak is for.
Targets are pointless without objectives. If the aim is short-term revenue, judge campaigns on ROAS and growth against last year. If the aim is market share, you should look for a lower return on first orders but an increase in return customers.
Judge the period by what those customers spend over the next 6 to 12 months. The new customer acquisition goal in Google Ads supports this by bidding more for people who haven’t bought from you before.
You should also consider whether Black Friday is the right time for you. Some brands are better off running their own promotion earlier or later in the season, once competitors have spent their budgets and bids are more reasonable. The best campaign is one that matches your busy season and not a general trend for retailers.
Shopping and Search structures that hold up at peak.
A single Performance Max or Shopping campaign containing every product is too broad. A peak season Shopping campaign structure works better when it separates products that behave differently:
- Margin. High-margin and low-margin products in separate campaigns, each with its own ROAS target. Products with a large margin can often run below the account target and still make a profit.
- Product value. High-value items such as furniture have a longer path to purchase and need their own target.
- Stock depth. Lines with deep stock can take a lower ROAS to clear. Low-stock lines need tighter control so you don’t pay for clicks on products about to sell out.
- Price competitiveness. Products priced well above the market go into a campaign with a controlled budget, so expectations are set before the sale starts.
Custom labels in the feed help you achieve this. Label products by margin band, stock level, price benchmark, performance brackets and/or offer, and the campaigns pick them up automatically. Over a sale longer than a week, the same labels can move products between campaigns as performance data comes in.
On Search, write the Black Friday and Cyber Monday ad copy ahead of time and use specialised promotion assets for the offer. Countdown customisers update the ad as the sale end approaches. Our paid search and PPC page covers how we set these accounts up across the year for anyone who wants expert support.
Warm campaigns up before the sale.
New campaigns launched on the day of a sale spend most of it in the learning period. Put the offer products into live campaigns now, so they have conversion history before the sale begins, then swap the ad copy and creative on launch day.
A longer promotion gives you time to optimise, provided you have the budget and enough creative to refresh as ads fatigue. Upper-funnel activity on YouTube, Demand Gen and paid social also builds the audiences your conversion campaigns will rely on later. Peak is a poor time to test a channel you’ve never run, because you’d be starting cold at the most expensive point of the year.
Set seasonality adjustments.
Smart bidding learns from recent history, so it can be slow to react when conversion rates jump. A seasonality adjustment in Google Ads tells the algorithm to expect a higher conversion rate for a set date range. Base it on last year’s conversion rate by day across November. Adjustments work best over short windows of a few days, such as the Black Friday weekend.
Plan the budget for a surge.
Budgets change regardless of your plans. Many businesses need to rise at peak just to stay competitive. In September 2025, one of our home and garden accounts was paying 29% more per click than a year earlier. On the same budget, that’s 29% fewer clicks unless conversion rates rise.
Before the sale, agree how much extra budget is available with whoever signs off on spend. Settle what happens if a hero product sells out and who can approve changes over the weekend. Custom columns for budget pacing, expected spend and break-even CPC show which campaigns need more money. If you’re also reviewing what you pay for management, our guide to PPC agency costs compares the pricing models.
Fix the feed and submit merchant promotions early.
Next, get into the nuts and bolts. Check the diagnostics in Merchant Center and Meta Commerce Manager for:
- missing GTINs, which can stop products from showing on Google
- invalid sale prices, which cause disapprovals just as the offer goes live
- products with only one image
- low click potential, which often points to weak images or titles
- delivery speed, delivery cost and returns in the shopping experience scorecard
Manual merchant promotions can take a couple of days to be approved, so submit them well before the sale. Upload ad creative early for the same reason.
Track competitor prices.
A discount only works if the price is competitive once it’s applied. The price competitiveness report in Merchant Center shows how your prices compare by brand, category and product. Export it, add your margin data, and you can see which products have room to move. The benchmark status can also go into the feed as a custom label so competitive products get more budget. The report does have a lag so reviewing ahead of Black Friday can help you to benchmark, but keep live prices under review during the period. There are tools such as our Armadello competitor insights which facilitate live competitor price tracking allowing you to be reactive to daily competitor price changes.
Build audiences and upload customer lists now.
In GA4, create audiences for your Black Friday page, the offer categories and your best-selling products. Set them to 365 days so next year starts with a full year of data. A Black Friday hub page that stays live all year, with an email sign-up for early access, keeps those audiences growing. If your GA4 setup needs work first, our analytics setup service covers it.
Upload customer email lists to Google Ads as Customer Match audiences, segmented into recent, lapsed and high-value customers. Use the same segments on Meta. Layer them onto campaigns with custom segments built from Black Friday product searches.
Check tracking before launch.
Place test orders through every payment method to make sure there are no points of resistance. For lead generation, make sure a failed form submission doesn’t record a conversion before the real one. If platform figures sit well below actual sales, server-side tracking can restore much of the lost signal, though it needs testing well ahead of peak.
Offers and creative that cut through.
In our experience, 10% off rarely gets noticed at Black Friday, while 20% gives a clear lift in click-through rate, subject to margin. A mix of strong offers and slower lines performs more reliably than discounting products that never sold.
With more targeting automated, creative is just as important. A lot of brands tend to mimic the day with black as the backdrop and a bolder accent colour on ads. This works as people tend to look for these markers when going on a Black Friday shopping spree. Frames on catalogue ads help products stand out, and each platform needs assets in its own aspect ratio.
A pre-launch checklist.
Our head of paid media’s checklist for the weeks before Black Friday:
- Set seasonality adjustments for the sale dates.
- Submit manual merchant promotions a few days early.
- Audit the product feed and fix visibility errors.
- Set up competitor price tracking.
- Warm up new campaigns to shorten the learning period.
- Build remarketing audiences and upload customer email lists.
- Check tracking across every payment method.
- Agree how far budgets can surge during the sale.
Have a second person check campaigns, schedules and dates before launch, including that rules use UK date format. For more, check out Pete Keyworth’s webinar.
Once the sale is live.
Make changes in small steps. A Meta ad set hitting its target at £40 a day will rarely hold the same ROAS at £100. Keep budgets under review for any high performing campaigns that become limited. Check auction insights daily and pause or move offers that have enough clicks but aren’t converting. Keep an eye on the feed too. A feed that stops updating partway through Black Friday is an expensive problem to find late.
If you’d like a second opinion on your account before the sale, we can review the structure, feed and tracking for you.
