Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just around the corner, and for marketers, that means one of the busiest and most competitive trading periods of the year. CPMs climb, creative burns out fast, and there’s very little room for error.
While there’s plenty of optimisation to be done during the sale itself, I’ve always found that the preparation leading up to it makes a huge difference to how confidently you can manage those days.
With that in mind, here’s what I’d be prioritising in the weeks ahead.
Get your media investment working early
If you have access to reservation buys, securing them ahead of the Q4 spike can help lock in CPMs before competition drives costs up. I’d focus those campaigns on video views and engagement, building an audience that can be retargeted when Black Friday and Cyber Monday arrive.
And that audience doesn’t need to stop working when the sale ends. Once Black Friday is over, you can exclude recent purchasers from acquisition campaigns and use your existing engagement pools for December gifting and cross-sell activity. It’s an opportunity to get more value from the investment you’ve already made across two major shopping periods.
I’d also spend time looking at last year’s performance before making any decisions about pacing or budget allocation. Which days converted best? When did CPMs peak? Where did campaigns run out of budget while demand was still strong? There’s no reason to start from scratch when you already have data that can help inform this year’s plan.
Get the operational work out of the way
There’s a lot of attention on media strategy and creative in the lead-up to Black Friday, but some of the most frustrating problems I’ve encountered during peak trading have been operational.
Campaign shells, naming conventions, tracking and approvals should all be built and QA’d well before launch. Just as importantly, make sure everyone involved is clear on the approval process and who needs to be available outside normal working hours. If an ad gets disapproved at 9 p.m. on Black Friday, you want to know who’s responsible for getting it fixed.
I’d also get your platform reps involved as early as possible. They can help with readiness checks, creative best practice reviews, audience recommendations, measurement and tracking, and any relevant betas or seasonal trends. Those conversations are far more useful when there’s still time to act on their recommendations.
Give your creative and campaigns room to perform
Creative fatigue can set in quickly during peak trading, particularly when campaigns are delivering at higher frequency and there’s so much competition for attention.
Ideally, creative should be ready early enough to review against platform best practices and make sure it balances what’s right for the brand with what actually resonates with the audience. I’d also recommend having two or three refresh variants ready to go, so you’re not scrambling for new assets if performance starts dropping.
Once campaigns are live and performing, I’d avoid making unnecessary changes that could disrupt delivery. As a general rule of thumb, I’m cautious about budget increases above 20–30% on campaigns still in the learning phase, although the right approach will depend on the platform and campaign setup.
For more significant changes, duplicating a winning setup may be worth testing rather than disrupting the original campaign, although you’ll still need to account for the learning period on any new campaign. The goal is to give strong campaigns room to perform while keeping enough flexibility to respond to what’s happening.
Don’t let platform ROAS tell the whole story
Black Friday can make platform performance look particularly impressive, especially when retargeting audiences that are already highly likely to purchase. But strong in-platform ROAS doesn’t necessarily mean your advertising drove all of those sales.
I’d be looking at Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) alongside platform metrics to understand how efficiently total marketing spend is translating into revenue. And where budgets and scale allow, incrementality testing can help establish how much additional value the advertising actually generated.
That distinction matters during a promotional period when consumers may already be planning to purchase. Understanding what your activity contributed is much more useful than simply reporting a strong ROAS, particularly when you’re planning where to invest next.
Make the big days about performance, not firefighting
None of this is particularly complicated, but all of it takes time. And time is the one thing you can’t buy back once the sale starts.
If you haven’t already, now’s the time to get your marketing teams, agency partners and platform reps aligned. Review what worked last year, make sure your campaigns and creative are ready, and leave yourself room to focus on performance when the sale starts.
