Black Friday might fall on Friday 27th November this year, but if that is when you start thinking about your marketing, you have already left it too late.
For ecommerce businesses, Black Friday is one of the biggest opportunities in the calendar. It is also one of the most competitive. More brands are advertising, customers are comparing offers and every business wants a bigger share of the increased demand.
The businesses that put themselves in the strongest position are usually the ones preparing well before Black Friday arrives.
Your Google Ads campaigns, Meta Ads, SEO, product feeds, landing pages, remarketing audiences and conversion tracking all need attention before the rush begins.
At Outrank, we believe Black Friday success starts before Black Friday.
When Should You Start Planning for Black Friday?
Ideally, your Black Friday planning should begin weeks, if not months, before the event itself.
Starting early gives you time to understand what you want to achieve, decide which products or services you want to promote and make sure your wider digital marketing strategy supports those goals.
It also gives your marketing team time to identify problems before they become expensive.
Is your website ready for increased traffic? Are your Google Ads campaigns structured effectively? Is your product feed accurate? Have you built remarketing audiences? Can you accurately track sales and enquiries?
These are questions you want answered before Black Friday week, not during it.
Why Is Early Black Friday Planning So Important?
Black Friday can bring more people to your website, but increased traffic alone does not guarantee increased revenue.
If your ads are targeting the wrong audience, your landing pages are difficult to use or your tracking is not working correctly, increasing your advertising budget can simply mean spending more money on the same problems.
Preparing early gives you time to review the entire customer journey. From the moment someone sees your business in Google Search, Shopping or on social media through to the moment they make a purchase, every stage should be working together.
That is why we recommend looking beyond the offer itself, a great Black Friday discount can attract attention. A strong digital strategy helps turn that attention into sales.
Are Your Google Ads Ready for Black Friday?
For ecommerce brands, Google Ads can play a major role in Black Friday performance. But simply increasing your budget in November is not a strategy.
Before Black Friday, review how your campaigns are structured, which products are generating revenue and where budget is being spent. You should also look at audience signals, Shopping campaigns, Performance Max campaigns and the quality of your product feed.
Your feed deserves particular attention; product titles, descriptions, images, prices, availability and other information all contribute to how your products appear across Google Shopping.
This preparation also gives you an opportunity to identify your strongest campaigns and products before competition increases.
Have You Prepared Your Meta Ads and Remarketing Audiences?
Not every customer will purchase the first time they discover your business. That makes building audiences before Black Friday particularly valuable.
Meta Ads can help you introduce your products to potential customers earlier in their buying journey, while remarketing allows you to reconnect with people who have already interacted with your business.
Someone who visits your website in October could become a Black Friday customer in November.
By starting your campaigns early, you can build awareness and gather useful audience data rather than trying to create demand from scratch during one of the busiest advertising periods of the year.
Can SEO Help With Black Friday?
SEO should not be forgotten just because Black Friday is heavily associated with paid advertising. If you want your business to appear organically for Black Friday-related searches, creating a page a few days before the event gives search engines very little time to discover, understand and rank it.
Preparing your Black Friday content early allows you to optimise relevant pages, improve internal linking and make sure search engines can find your content. It is also worth thinking beyond one weekend.
Where appropriate, maintaining and updating the same Black Friday landing page each year can give you a longer-term asset rather than starting again with a completely new page every November.
Is Your Website Ready to Turn Black Friday Traffic Into Sales?
You can have brilliant ads and an attractive offer, but they can only do so much if your website makes buying difficult. Before increasing traffic, look at what happens when someone arrives on your website.
Are your landing pages easy to navigate? Are your offers clear? Does the site work properly on mobile? Can customers easily find delivery information? Is the checkout process straightforward?
You should also check website speed, stock information, calls to action and any potential barriers in the conversion journey.
Black Friday is not only about generating more traffic. It is about making more of the traffic you already have.
Is Your Conversion Tracking Working Properly?
Accurate data becomes even more important when you are spending more on advertising. Before Black Friday, check that your ecommerce and conversion tracking is working correctly across the channels you plan to use.
You need to know which campaigns are generating sales, where customers are coming from and how your marketing activity is performing.
Without reliable tracking, it becomes much harder to make informed decisions when campaigns are live.
Finding a tracking problem halfway through Black Friday weekend is far from ideal. Testing everything beforehand gives you much greater confidence in the data you will be using.
Should You Just Increase Your Advertising Budget for Black Friday?
More budget does not automatically mean more sales. If a campaign is inefficient before Black Friday, putting significantly more money behind it will not necessarily solve the problem.
Look at campaign structure, targeting, product feeds, audiences, landing pages and conversion data first. Once you understand what is performing, you can make much more informed decisions about where additional budget could have the greatest impact.
Our work with ecommerce businesses demonstrates why this matters.
For WeMakeBeds, restructuring Google Ads campaigns, improving audience signals and optimising the Shopping feed helped increase revenue by 58.22% and conversions by 75.69%.
For UK Home Crafts, a joined-up approach across Google Ads and Meta Ads contributed to a 52.9% increase in Google Ads revenue, alongside 62 purchases generated through Meta Ads.
The principle is simple: focus on making your marketing work harder before simply spending more.
What Should Be on Your Black Friday Marketing Checklist?
Before Black Friday arrives, make sure you have reviewed your Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns, SEO visibility, product feeds, website performance, landing pages, conversion tracking, remarketing audiences, promotional offers and stock availability.
More importantly, consider how all of those elements work together.
A customer might discover your brand through Meta, search for your products on Google several days later and finally return through a remarketing ad when your Black Friday offer launches.
Your marketing strategy should account for the whole journey rather than treating each channel separately.
What Happens After Black Friday?
Your strategy should not finish when Black Friday does.
Cyber Monday follows immediately afterwards, with Christmas shopping, Boxing Day and January sales creating further opportunities.
You may also have built valuable new remarketing audiences, collected customer data and learned more about which products, messages and channels perform best for your business, use that information.
Black Friday should form part of your wider ecommerce growth strategy rather than existing as an isolated weekend of increased advertising spend.
Get Your Black Friday Strategy Ready With Outrank
Black Friday success does not start with switching on an ad in November.
It starts with understanding your audience, preparing your campaigns, improving your website, checking your tracking and making sure every part of your digital strategy is ready to work together.
At Outrank, our SEO, PPC, Paid Social and digital marketing teams can help you prepare your business for one of the busiest ecommerce periods of the year.
Whether you need support with Google Ads, Meta Ads, SEO, product feeds or your wider digital strategy, we can help you identify opportunities and get everything in place before Black Friday arrives.
Planning your Black Friday campaign? Speak to Outrank and get your Black Friday strategy ready.