Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall on 27–30 November 2026, and the accounts that win the period are the ones doing the work in September, not the ones writing ad copy in the third week of November. Expect cost per click to run 30% to 50% above your October baseline during peak week, and expect your usual ROAS target to become the wrong number. The single most common failure we see across e-commerce audits is not a bad Black Friday campaign — it is a store that held its normal ROAS target through a period when clicks cost half as much again, watched Smart Bidding throttle delivery to protect that target, and spent the biggest revenue week of the year invisible.
Quick reference:
- BFCM 2026: Friday 27 November to Monday 30 November
- Peak-week CPCs typically run 30–50% above October; budget for at least 25–30% higher
- Q4 should carry roughly 30–37% of annual Shopping spend
- Lower ROAS targets by 15–20% for peak week, or Smart Bidding will restrict your impression share
- Start remarketing audience building in September — a list built in November is already too late
- Launch campaigns at least two weeks before so bidding exits the learning phase before peak
Why does starting in November fail?
Because every mechanism Google uses to deliver your ads needs history, and history takes weeks to accumulate.
Smart Bidding re-enters a learning period whenever you materially change budget, target or structure. If you triple the budget on 25 November, the algorithm spends the highest-traffic days of the year learning rather than optimising. Remarketing lists have the same problem in reverse: an audience of Black Friday browsers only becomes useful after they have browsed, so the list that converts on Cyber Monday is the one you started filling in September and October.
Merchant Center is the third trap, and the most expensive. A feed disapproval during peak week is not a minor inconvenience — it removes your products from Shopping entirely, and Merchant Center suspension reviews routinely take longer than the sale lasts. Every price, availability and shipping value you plan to change for the promotion should be tested in October against a live feed, not on the night.
What budget do you actually need?
Two numbers matter, and most stores only think about one.
Total Q4 allocation. Across e-commerce accounts, Q4 typically warrants around 30% to 37% of annual Shopping spend. If you are spending evenly across twelve months, you are underfunding the quarter where the demand is and overfunding January. Pull the money from Q1 rather than adding it.
Peak-week uplift. Because CPCs rise 30% to 50%, holding your daily budget flat through peak week means buying 30% to 50% fewer clicks at exactly the moment your conversion rate is highest. Plan for daily budgets 25% to 30% higher than October as a floor, and treat the days either side of the weekend as part of the event.
There is a subtlety worth naming. Higher CPCs during BFCM are not evidence that the traffic is worse. Conversion rates rise across the period too, often enough to more than offset the click cost. The mistake is assuming the two move independently, then judging peak week on CPC alone. Work out the return your margins actually require with our break-even ROAS calculator and hold that, not last month’s number.
How should you adjust ROAS targets for peak week?
This is the piece that costs Australian stores the most money, and it is counter-intuitive.
If you run Target ROAS and leave the target untouched, Smart Bidding will do exactly what you told it: protect the return. When CPCs rise 40%, protecting that return means bidding less aggressively, losing auctions, and dropping impression share — during the week that produces the most revenue. Stores describe this as “Google throttled us over Black Friday.” Google did what the target instructed.
The practical adjustment is to lower peak-week ROAS targets by roughly 15% to 20%, deliberately and temporarily. You are accepting a lower return per sale in exchange for materially more sales, which on a high-volume week is usually the right trade — and it also feeds your customer list for the following year, where the real margin lives.
Two guardrails. Change the target in steps of no more than 15% at a time and no more than once a week, so the strategy does not reset into learning. And make the change in early-to-mid November, not on the Thursday night. Details on how each strategy responds are in our guide to Smart Bidding strategies.
Use seasonality adjustments for the peak days themselves. This is the tool built for exactly this problem and it is badly underused. A seasonality adjustment tells Smart Bidding to expect a specific change in conversion rate over a defined window, so the algorithm prices bids for the conversion rate you are actually going to get rather than waiting to observe it. Google’s seasonality adjustment documentation is explicit about the constraint: they are designed for short events of one to seven days and work poorly if applied for more than fourteen days at a time. So the correct combination is a modest standing target reduction across November plus a seasonality adjustment covering 27–30 November — not one blunt target change stretched across six weeks. Note the adjustment takes a conversion rate estimate, not a CPC estimate; if you tell it the wrong thing it will bid confidently in the wrong direction.
What is the week-by-week plan from August?
August — foundations. Audit conversion tracking end to end and confirm values are passing correctly, because every bidding decision from here rests on it. Fix Merchant Center warnings while there is no urgency. Review which products actually carry margin, since that determines where budget should go later.
September — audiences. This is the month that decides your December remarketing. Start building and segmenting lists now: all visitors, product viewers, cart abandoners, past purchasers. Upload your customer file for Customer Match — it is the one audience asset that does not decay with browser restrictions, and it will still be matchable in November. Lists need volume and time; neither can be bought in week 47.
October — structure and testing. Decide Performance Max versus Standard Shopping per product group rather than for the whole account; our comparison of the two covers the decision. Test your promotional feed changes against the live feed. Write and launch ad copy variants now so you have performance data before it matters. Build the promotion landing pages and get them indexed.
November, weeks 1–3. Launch the campaigns. Step the ROAS target down. Raise budgets gradually rather than in one jump. Add Merchant Center promotions and price-drop annotations — and submit them early, because every promotion goes through a policy and SKU review that Google states is typically completed within 12 to 24 hours of the effective start time. A promotion submitted on the Thursday evening can therefore miss most of Friday. By 20 November everything should be live and out of the learning phase.
Peak, 27–30 November. Monitor daily, do not restructure. Watch budget-limited status, impression share lost to budget, and feed status. The only changes worth making mid-event are budget increases on winners and pausing anything genuinely broken.
Post-peak. Australia’s calendar is unusual here: Black Friday flows into Christmas and then into Boxing Day, which for many Australian retailers is bigger than BFCM. Do not tear the structure down on 1 December. Roll the audiences forward.
Which campaign types carry a promotional period?
Standard Shopping gives you the control that promotions need: segment by margin, bid harder on genuinely discounted lines, and keep loss leaders visible without letting them consume the budget. For stores with meaningful margin variation across the catalogue, this remains the better instrument during peak.
Performance Max works when your catalogue is fairly uniform and your creative is strong, and it will find demand across surfaces you are not otherwise buying. Set brand exclusions before the period so it is not simply harvesting your own brand searches and reporting them as incremental. Accept that you get less granular control at the moment you most want it.
Search on brand terms deserves specific attention during BFCM. Competitor conquesting spikes, and the cost of losing your own brand traffic during peak week is far higher than the cost of defending it. Check brand impression share weekly from mid-November.
Demand Gen is the discovery layer, and it needs the longest runway. If you want it contributing in late November, it should be running by mid-October with audiences already built. Starting it during peak week buys you learning phase, not sales.
What should you fix before September?
Three things, in this order, because each one invalidates the work that follows it.
Conversion tracking and values. If your revenue values are wrong, every ROAS decision in this article is wrong with them. Verify that values pass correctly, that there is no double counting, and that enhanced conversions are configured. This is the highest-leverage hour you will spend all quarter.
Feed quality. Titles, images, GTINs, availability accuracy, shipping settings. Feed quality decides Shopping performance long before bidding does, and a promotional period magnifies both good and bad feeds.
Site speed and checkout on mobile. Peak-week traffic skews mobile, and a checkout that loses 10% of sessions loses them at triple the usual volume. This is not a Google Ads fix, but it determines the return on every dollar you are about to spend.
Frequently asked questions
When exactly is Black Friday 2026? Friday 27 November 2026, with Cyber Monday on 30 November. In practice the commercial period now runs from roughly mid-November through the first week of December, and in Australia it connects directly to the Christmas and Boxing Day trading period rather than standing alone.
How much should I increase my Google Ads budget for Black Friday? Plan for daily budgets at least 25% to 30% above your October baseline through peak week, because CPCs typically run 30% to 50% higher. Across the full quarter, Q4 usually justifies 30% to 37% of annual Shopping spend. The right number for your store depends on margin and capacity — our budget calculator will model it from your target.
Should I lower my ROAS target for Black Friday? Usually yes, by around 15% to 20% for peak week. Holding your normal target while CPCs rise 40% instructs Smart Bidding to reduce delivery precisely when demand peaks. Change it gradually in early-to-mid November so the strategy does not re-enter learning during the event.
When should I start preparing? Six to eight weeks minimum, which means September at the latest for audience building and October for structure and testing. The genuinely early work — conversion tracking, feed health, margin analysis — is best done in August while there is no time pressure.
Is Performance Max or Standard Shopping better for Black Friday? It depends on margin variation across your catalogue. If margins differ significantly by product, Standard Shopping segmented by margin gives you the control a promotion needs. If your catalogue is uniform, Performance Max is reasonable. Many stores run both, split by product group.
What is the most common Black Friday mistake? Restructuring during peak week. Every material change resets learning, so the account spends the highest-traffic days re-learning instead of optimising. The second most common is a Merchant Center disapproval triggered by a promotional price or availability change that was never tested against the live feed in October.
Black Friday rewards preparation and punishes improvisation, and by mid-November the outcome is largely already set. We audit e-commerce accounts ahead of peak season, get the tracking and feed right while there is still time to fix things, and set targets that let the account actually spend when demand arrives. If you want your account looked at before September, get in touch.