5 Things Ecommerce Marketers Should Do Before Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Black Friday and Cyber Monday may only account for a few days of the year, but for ecommerce marketers, preparing for them should start months in advance. This is our main event! Therefore, we need to treat it as such and have a game plan ready to go.

During this time, competition increases, CPCs rise, promotions change, budgets spend faster, and there’s very little room for guesswork.

The brands that are best positioned for BFCM aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or deepest discounts. They're the ones that enter the period knowing what they're likely to face, how much they're willing to spend, and exactly what they'll do when performance changes.

So, before BFCM arrives, make sure you have your game plan ready.

To help you get started, here are five things ecommerce marketers should have in place.

Table of Contents:

1. Understand the Competitive Landscape
2. Build a Budget Plan That Leaves Room to Scale
3. Get Your Promotional Campaigns Ready Early
4. Protect Your Brand
5. Have a BFCM Monitoring Plan

1. Understand the Competitive Landscape

You shouldn't enter the most competitive shopping period of the year without understanding who you're likely to be competing against.

That would be like showing up for a championship game knowing nothing about the team you're playing. Teams spend hours watching film, studying stats, identifying weaknesses, and building plays around what they expect their opponent to do. Ecommerce marketers should approach BFCM the same way.

Start by looking at historical Auction Insights (in Google Ads and/or Microsoft Ads) from previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday periods. Don't just identify your largest competitors; look at how the auction itself changed as demand increased.

Questions worth answering include:

• Which competitors increased impression share during previous BFCM periods?
• Did new competitors enter the auction?
• Did your own impression share increase or decrease?
• How did CPCs respond as competition intensified?
• Were certain campaigns or product categories affected more than others?

Then widen the lens.

Compare CPC trends across previous quarters and years. If CPCs historically rise 10%, 20%, or more during November, that should influence how you forecast the upcoming period.

This is particularly important because higher demand doesn't automatically mean better efficiency. More consumers may be shopping, but more advertisers are competing for those consumers at the same time. A campaign that normally generates a $3 CPC could suddenly cost $3.50 or $4 simply to maintain similar auction visibility.

That changes the amount of budget required to capture the same volume.

Historical performance won't tell you exactly what will happen this year, but it gives you a much stronger starting point than assuming Q3 auction dynamics will carry into Q4.

The goal isn't to predict the auction perfectly. It's to understand the outcomes and how you can best prepare for them.

2. Build a Budget Plan That Leaves Room to Scale

Once you understand what the competitive landscape could look like, translate that into a budget plan.

One of the biggest mistakes ecommerce advertisers can make heading into BFCM is treating the media budget as a single fixed number. Instead, think about your budget in layers.

First, establish the baseline budget required to support the demand you already expect.

Next, account for potential CPC inflation. If historical data suggests CPCs increase substantially during peak shopping periods, your budget needs to increase simply to maintain similar traffic and auction coverage.

Finally, establish a reserve budget that can be unlocked if demand and performance justify additional investment. For example, your BFCM plan might account for:

1. Baseline spend required to support forecasted demand
2. Incremental spend required to absorb expected CPC inflation
3. Additional incremental budget for real-time scaling opportunities

That third bucket is important. Forecasts are useful, but BFCM moves quickly. If conversion rates suddenly increase, a promotion dramatically outperforms expectations, or a high-priority product category starts gaining momentum, you don't want to spend half the day waiting for budget approval.

Just remember, having additional budget available doesn't mean you should automatically spend it. Determine your performance guardrails ahead of time. That might mean maintaining a certain ROAS, revenue-to-spend ratio, revenue number per category, or conversion rate before incremental budget can be released.

The goal isn't simply to spend more during BFCM. It's to make sure you have enough budget to remain competitive while maintaining the flexibility to spend more when the opportunity justifies it.

3. Get Your Promotional Campaigns Ready Early

The week of Black Friday is not the time to start building campaigns.

Your campaign structure, feeds, promotional assets, and tracking should be ready to go well before your sale goes live.

Depending on your strategy, preparation may include:

• Building dedicated promotional campaigns or product segmentation
• Preparing promotional ad copy and creative
• Creating or updating promotion assets
• Setting up Merchant Center promotions
• Validating sale pricing and promotional annotations
• Building promotional landing pages
• Updating feed labels used to identify promotional products
• Confirming conversion tracking and promotional URLs
• Preparing campaigns in a paused state so they can be activated quickly

This is even more important for large ecommerce catalogs. If only certain SKUs are included in a promotion, those products should be clearly identifiable within your feed so they can be segmented, promoted, and monitored separately when necessary.

This also gives you more control over budget. Rather than allowing promotional and non-promotional products to compete for the same campaign budget, you can intentionally prioritize the products most relevant to the sale.

Preparing early also gives you something every ecommerce marketer needs during BFCM: time to fix things.

Promotional details change. Products sell out. Merchant Center disapproves something. Creative gets updated. Landing pages change.

The more you can build and review in advance, the less time you'll spend troubleshooting when the sale is already live.

4. Protect Your Brand

Brand campaigns can become surprisingly expensive during BFCM.

Competitors increase budgets, promotional messaging becomes more aggressive, and more advertisers may begin bidding against searches containing your brand. At the same time, branded traffic is often some of the highest-intent traffic available.

That makes brand protection important, but protecting your brand doesn't mean blindly bidding whatever it takes to maintain 100% impression share.

Before BFCM, review your historical brand impression share and CPC trends, particularly during previous Q4 periods. Then establish clear guardrails for how aggressively you're willing to defend that traffic. That may include:

• A minimum Search Impression Share target
• A maximum CPC you're willing to tolerate
• A maximum spend-to-revenue ratio
• Competitor monitoring for significant auction changes

For example, maintaining 90% Search Impression Share may be strategically important. But if moving from 90% to 95% requires CPCs to increase dramatically, those incremental clicks may not justify the additional cost.

That's why the decision shouldn't be made while you're watching CPCs spike on Black Friday morning.

Know what you're willing to pay to protect high-value brand traffic, and where you're willing to let efficiency win, before the auction gets more expensive.

5. Have a BFCM Monitoring Plan

Once BFCM begins, the challenge shifts from planning to decision-making. Performance will move quickly, which makes it tempting to react to every fluctuation you see.

Don't.

Before the sale begins, determine exactly what your team will monitor, how frequently you'll monitor it, and what actually warrants action. Your monitoring plan might include:

• Spend and budget pacing
• Revenue and ROAS
• CPC monitoring
• Conversion rate fluctuations
• Impression Share monitoring
• Lost Impression Share due to budget flags
• Brand coverage
• Product or category-level performance
• Promotion performance
• Inventory or product availability
• Competitor movement
• Merchant Center or feed issues

More importantly, establish thresholds for these actions. A CPC increasing 5% may not require intervention, but a campaign approaching its daily budget by noon might. A one-hour drop in conversion rate may be noise. A sustained decline combined with a sudden landing-page issue is something very different.

The same principle applies to strong performance.

If a campaign is significantly outperforming its target, conversion rates are rising, and additional demand is available, your team should already know when they're authorized to unlock incremental budget.

If you’ve monitored a Google Ads account during the BFCM period, then you know things happen fast. The goal of monitoring isn't to make more changes.

It's to identify the changes that actually matter faster so you don’t miss out on that additional opportunity in real time.

Preparation Creates Flexibility

BFCM will always be unpredictable.

Competitors will change promotions. CPCs will fluctuate. Consumer demand won't perfectly follow your forecast. Some products will outperform expectations while others won't. You can't eliminate that uncertainty. What you can eliminate is the need to make every decision from scratch while it's happening.

Understand the auction you're walking into. Build a budget that accounts for competition. Prepare promotional campaigns before you need them. Establish brand guardrails. And create a monitoring plan that tells your team when to act.

Show up to that championship game ready to conquer.

Because once Black Friday arrives, your strategy shouldn't still be up for debate. You should already be executing it.