Black Friday Google Ads Prep: Timeline, Offers, Targets and Budget

You might think, "Yo, Chris, Black Friday, still super far away. I have time until end of November." But what if I'm telling you right now, you're already running behind? You're already late. And if you're not fully prepared yet, if you're not have offer type pricing, stock situation, and every single point on the check is properly dialed in at this point, then this video is for you because I will tell you the five six key issues I always see every single year. and the five key things you need to have prepared for this Black Friday in order to crush it and get the most out of it.

So, without further ado, let's dive straight into it. The first

and most important thing to understand is the real calendar, the real timeline, right? Because like I just said, like a lot of people think, yo, Chris, Black Friday, end of November, you know, like November 27th, whatever, something like that, right? That's where we start. Then we have Black Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Cyber Monday, whatever, right? It's like these couple of days a lot of people think but you fail to realize how early it actually begins. We see the first Black Friday deals usually beginning of October already. Then even retail joins in quite early on, end of October, mid October, beginning of November at the latest and try to see these Black Friday deals all over the place. And we always

have major success with the early November pre-sale, the early Black Friday sales. Why? Because people are already ready to buy, right? Like you have you have November, you have Christmas coming up. People know Black Friday is around the corner. So they they're kind of already ready to buy, you know? They're already looking for those deals. And you can swoop them in already without facing all the competition that joins in later that year, right? With Black Friday, Christmas sale, like it's huge. CPMs are skyrocketing. CPC is high and it's actually quite difficult for some brands to properly push into the auction during Black Friday and achieve meaningful results, right?

It's way easier if you're prepared. You start with early Black Friday sales, right? You have the right offer at the right time and you're not facing all the competition yet. And again, we're not talking about discounts only, right? That's lazy way. That just typically hurts your margin, right? And we're talking about offer types in in a second. But you should have the campaigns up and running the like the Black Friday specific campaigns beginning of November at the latest, right? You should have the game plan ready like we said the right offer at the right time. You should warm up your list. You you should prime them as well, right?

Like warming up towards Black Friday like step by step, right? And there will there will be people that are ready to buy beginning of November. There will be people that are ready to buy mid of November. And there will be a certain level of uh audience that buys during Black Friday, of course. And then

there's also the phase after Black Friday, right? It doesn't stop. Typically, we also have our biggest month in in December, depending on the niche a little bit as well. Why? Because you have all the Black Friday momentum, right? All that momentum if it goes really well, but it carries on until Christmas pretty much. Why? Because like Christmas sale is also immensely powerful, right? And it's it's the gift giving season. It's one of the most potent um periods of the year for for e-commerce basically. So yeah, this this whole timeline of Black Friday and it just being a couple of days is completely wrong, right? It kind of like goes throughout Q4 and it starts early October.

The preparation should start now, midepptember at the latest, right? If you're still kind of like, oh, we have time like you're cooked already, right? like you need to get ready now and then it starts early October, mid October, end of October at the latest and then it's all about Black Friday. It's about warming up the list, having the pre-sales, having different offer types, just getting in there already before prime time, right? If you're just like, oh, we'll crush it on Black Friday. We will increase the budgets, you might get disappointed later on, right? It doesn't doesn't work that way. And we typically see our best days around Black Friday, right?

early September afterwards in December and Black Friday is just just another day. Of course, we're crushing it there as well. But if that's your only game plan, right, just having a 20% discount around Black Friday, uh you're missing out. You're missing out. I'm not saying you cannot achieve success with it, right? It's still Black Friday. I mean, it's still still Black Friday, still before, but you might leave money on the table. So, understand the timeline first, right? That's the most important thing. All right. The next and one of the most

important steps during your Black Friday preparation is the offer type. You have to lock in the offer, right? And I always emphasize that in general like the offer is one of your most important things, right? But it's even more important for Black Friday because yeah, obviously the discounts work, right? But discounts can also be a lazy way and it's not feasible for everyone, right? You can give a 20 30% discount and again it's effective, right? discounts work obviously like we all love a nice discount right but it can also hurt your profit margin a lot and there are better more creative ways also like to maximize AOB and conversion rate right just like value stacking on top of just like 20% off right it's not really like it doesn't really make me excited to be like ah 20% off right great I waited all year for just that right it's like it's not a killer offer in itself so a couple of alternatives just to give you some ideas and inspiration, right?

In the end, it depends a little bit on on your niche, on your product, on your unique situation, on which offer type is the best, right? It's not like, oh, you should do bundles, right? That's what works best. It depends a little bit like it it heavily depends actually on your unique situation, right? So, I'm just giving you a couple of ideas what we see working well across the board basically for for some of our clients, right? One

way I like is bundles and sets, like having a a complete set, right? Automatically boosts AOV. You can typically combine it with some discounts as well. And again, it's the combination of like, okay, having it in a bundle, having it in a set, automatically boosting AOV also makes it easier for you to give some some discounts on it, right? You can kind of do a little bit of value stacking on top when it's like a kind of like a unique set as well. And again, it depends a little bit on the situation. Can you actually do that unique set, right? like but having special where it's like okay this is only available right now during like

Friday in this shape or form right you cannot get it at any other time of the year like that that gives some extra urgency and scarcity on top right because it's not just like oh I can get a 10% discount like no this kind of thing is only available right now and then then it's gone again right and you cannot buy it like that so I see like combining different different offer types or like stacking these these things on top as well, right? And again, it depends a little bit, okay, what's the situation? You can be creative with it as well. Depends on your margin which you have on this specific product that you want to promote. So, it's it's not

black and white, right? So, I'm just giving you some ideas. Free gift with a certain minimum ad spend can be offer type. Then number three is like the typical volume discount, right? Again, also pushes the EOB. spend more, save more, like 10% when buying two products, 15% when buying three, four, whatever. Right? So, it's basically this uh volume discount. Very similar in that direction is Borggo, right? Multiply offers, buy three, get one one for free on top. Something like that can work really well in certain niches as well. Again, it depends like does that even make sense for your product? Is that something you can do?

Does the margin allow it? And

then as we already talked about margin and it depends, right? take that as a variable into account as well and be selective on where to do what where to give what kind of discount right for example if there is a certain product type you kind of want to get rid of it anyway right you're not continuing uh to sell it then this is obviously something where like okay here I can be a bit more aggressive with discounts right so you have to be strategic about it as well it's not just like h 20% be smart about it right create those offers create the sets see what makes most sense for for you in your specific situation because there are like big differences on what kind of offer could work well in the supplement niche compared to the jewelry niche compared to the home decor niche, right?

Completely different different things you have to take into account here. But my point is really think deeply about the offer. Make it as valuable as possible. Try to value stack. The point is like you can do more than just like a 20% off, right? You can create a killer offer for Black Friday. And again, that's the most important part like I didn't didn't properly mention that you can do different offer types depending on the timeline, right? You have this for early November, you have this for Black Friday, you have this for Christmas sale, right? And really be strategic about it. Now, next

point on your checklist, and this might sound a bit obvious, right? But trust me, I see this mistake every single year by so many brands regardless of the niche, regardless of the size of the brand. I think it's because it sounds quite obvious, right? And it does sound easy and you have all these crazy checkpoints on your checklist, right? And like we need to do this, we need to do the offer, we need to t it in, create a strategy, blah blah blah. And then you forget the most obvious one, right? You want to make sure everything is properly set up and properly fixed so you don't have to fix bottlenecks during Black Friday, right?

For example, feed. Is everything approved? Is everything live for Black Friday? You don't want to have a situation where your winners are disapproved or part of the feed is disapproved before Black Friday, right? That would be like, imagine you put all that energy and preparation into it and then it's like, it's not even life, right? What the what's going on here? And that's an obvious one, but it's also like is tracking properly set up? Do we have some tracking issues? Right? So tracking feed, product page, is there anything on the product page, right? Is it like loading too slow? Like some of these super obvious things that that are not so obvious after all, right?

Because this sounds so obvious, it's easy to forget about it. But you want to have this like health check basically, right? It's a health check. It's a quality check during Black

Friday. And during peak times, you kind of like want to do it every day, right? During Black Friday, during Saturday, Sunday, Cyber Monday, you kind of want to have this checklist in place every single day. Is this still live? Is this still working? Is anything disapproved? Right? Because it can cost you so much money, especially during these peak hours, these peak days, if that's not logged in, right? And that's about it. We will not talk about that point too much, right? It's very obvious again, but it has to be dialed in, right? If

you forget about that because it's the easy part, then it can burn badly. Next import split and when you start with the Black Friday campaigns, right? Also super important. We talked about the sales cycle begins early November at the latest and when you run what? Warming up the audience, warming up the campaigns, warming up the list, right? And it's not just about email marketing. you also like need to slowly get the campaign rolling. If you launch your Black Friday campaign on Thursday, right, it's obviously not ready to deliver properly on on Friday. Like it still has to go through the learning phase. So that's an aspect as well like I said and it depends a little bit on your specific timeline when you want to start running what.

But we start with it typically end of October, beginning of November, right? And then it also depends a little bit on the campaign type with demand YouTube ads. It's quite easy. We definitely have it fully separate in a separate campaign, separate ad group at least. With shopping, it's a bit different. It doesn't make sense to really have a separate Black Friday campaign there, right? It depends a little bit. Again, it depends. It always depends instead of black and white. It depends on your plan, but typically we still have our main structure in place. The only important thing you want to

make sure of is that you have a proper structure, right? You have a campaign for your winners. You have the low performers isolated. you have potentially something for the sleeper zombies and you have your catch all campaign, right? The risk is if you have everything in one campaign, you might lack some control, right? Last year, for example, during Black Friday, it was really difficult with some of our high scaling stores to even push into the auction. Right? We had great results, but there was so much competition, we couldn't even spend it properly. So, the whole budget basing was quite difficult, even more difficult if you have targets in place, right?

And we will talk about that in the in the next step. Super important as well. But the thing is if you okay if I just have one main campaign, it's a bit more difficult to control that, right? Make sure we can properly push into the auction and the the basing and the performance is is on on point, right? It's a bit easier if I have multiple campaigns because then I'm like, okay, we have the winner campaign here. I can be a bit more aggressive with that one compared to the campaign for the for the zombies, for the sleepers, right? And then you have multiple campaigns and then you can pull in levers with a bit more flexibility right you can say okay I push more here I keep it easier there you have more control and just be like okay one campaign we will try to push oh Google doesn't doesn't take it right so like with with more campaigns with a better structure that makes sense for you also have better control during Black Friday right so but again it it heavily depends I'm just giving you some some ideas and insights here it's really really difficult to just tell you like okay do it like this right it it really depends

but these are like some overarching principles on what just makes sense for everyone then the next point is absolutely key because this one can kill your whole Black Friday weekend right it's the whole topic about target roars which bit strategy how should I set my target should I set the target in the first place and this one has been like I said this one has been a a big big thing for me last year because we saw wildly different outputs depending on how we set the target if we set a target also in terms of budget basing and and everything. And the main thing for you is like you don't want to radically start to change things right before Black Friday, right?

If you have a target in place, generally speaking, and it works well for you, what you don't want to do is just like switch bit strategy and remove it completely for Black Friday so it has freedom to spend, right? That can massively backfire and again it was an issue for me last year because when we saw on some accounts like ah target is very limiting that kind of sucks. We removed it completely and then it fired back a little bit with like yeah two massive spend in a short period of time and performance was not ideal. Right. So it's like very difficult to find a sweet spot here because obviously we want to have a certain budget trajectory, right?

And the the whole thing with budget basing and and and getting most out of it. But at the same time, if you always work with a target and you decide on Black Friday to just remove it, that can

backfire massively. Another thing you don't want to do if you work with a target, don't keep it too high in the first place because that can be restrictive. And we saw it a lot last year. Why? because there's so much competition coming in now with mass expand. If you have your targets high, you might be surprised on how little you will be able to spend during Black Friday, right? Because then you you just cannot push into the auction. So that's the thing and that's why you also don't want to start to increase it before Black Friday, right? You want to go the the opposite way a little bit.

You can slowly start to lower it depending on the performance you get uh building up to Black Friday, right? And then on Black Friday, you have to see a little bit. It's a fine dance, right? You need to find the sweet spot. You don't want to like lower it too much in a way where you send the wrong signals to Google and be like, "Whatever, I'm fine with a super low low target, a super low performance, right?" So that's why you

also need to stay on top of your campaigns throughout the day and really see the budget basing. All right, it's like 10:00 a.m. How much did we spend already? What do we currently get in terms of revenue? Right? And you check in every hour in order to see, okay, budget basing, roars, are we on top of it? Where do we need to cut? Where do we need to push? And you cannot just be like, you know, let it rip, you know, lean back, do your thing. You cannot Black Friday is one of these days and the the whole weekend in general where you really have to stay on top of it and check it almost on on an hourly basis to see if it makes sense.

Especially if you have high spend, right? Disregard everything. If you just spend like a couple hundred bucks a day, then it doesn't matter, right? Just keep treat it as a normal days. If you have high spend, uh it's we were talking about high stakes as well and it's a whole different story. I mean on some accounts last year we spent 20 30 40,000 a day on Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, on Monday, right? That's a whole different

thing. Then another topic that might be a little bit controversial in the Google community is the whole thing of seasonality adjustments during Black Friday, right? And for me personally, I never used it in the last one, two years. It never made sense to me and it was always working perfectly fine because my take on that is like Google knows that you have Black Friday right now. The algorithm understands what's going on, right? So you don't need to manually set up things and tweak things in terms of seasonality adjustments in order to maximize your performance. And I typically see it firing back. There have been some studies on it as well.

I do not recall the exact link of that study. I mean we could probably find it. It was from optimizer and they had a whole whole thing of like okay does make sense, right? seasonality adjustments just disregard them for Black Friday because again it's just like for me it's also purely logical right it doesn't really make much sense Google understands right the algorithm understands what's going on and you don't you don't need to to manually tweak it in that case just let it run adjust your budgets adjust targets what makes sense and then adjust it back after Black Friday depending on on your budget goals on your performance goals and what's going on overall for you right but you don't have to do any of them.

It does it doesn't make much sense and I typically just see weird output when you try to mess with it, right? So, it doesn't make sense. But again, it's a bit controversial. Some people swear on it. Me personally, I don't understand it. All right. Another super crucial

thing if you want to crush it during Black Friday. I love that one. I think it's it's also one of these things you kind of like don't really consider, but I do see a lot of mistakes with it. And that's the whole budget ramp up, right? If you want to go hard on Black Friday, if you want to scale, you cannot go from zero to 100 like that. It will not perform, right? Or you might not even be able to spend the whole budget what we discussed before. So that's why you need to respect that whole timeline and slowly build up, right? And and get your campaigns running, get them out of the learning phase and slowly start to scale.

Because if you're like, I'm just spending like 500 a day right now. I get great draws. I get great profit margin and I will keep it like that, right? And then I can go hard on Black Friday. Yes, I do understand where you're coming from, but it will not work, right? If you want to go from there to here and then go really hard, have no profit margin left, right? Or like just horrible, horrible KPI. So, ideally, you build up slowly and then you're already on a high level, already on a respectable level during Black Friday, right? everything is properly dialed in. You're out of the learning phase.

You're already spending properly and then you just crank it up a notch even more for Black Friday and this this whole sale sales period, right? So that's the important important part. You need to kind of like go linearly a little bit. You need to build up to it, right? You cannot just go from I'll just stay on that level and then Black Friday I will increase my budget by 50x, right? Like it will not work. it will backfire in in some shape or form. Either you're not able to spend it fully or results will suck, right? It will be bad. So that's a key key thing as well.

Kind of goes hand inhand with some of the other topics we discussed. But I do see that mistake very often as well, right? Where people are like, let's keep it lean. Let's let's optimize profit margin before Black Friday and then on Black Friday we are really aggressive. Great plan, just doesn't work, right? So yeah, that's it for today's video. Let me know if you have any questions and if you want to see a second part of it. Like I said, there's so many many variables. If you like the video, subscribe, like, and drop in the comments what else you want to see and then I can focus on that for the next videos.

Thank you very much and speak soon.