Google Ads & Black Friday 2026 [Month by Month Guide]

Black Friday can either make or break your brand every single year, and that's why it is important to make sure that you get your Black Friday and your silly season right. But especially when it comes to Google Ads, it's not as simple as just increasing your budget, putting an offer out there, and hoping for the best. Because we know that the best brands that see success with Black Friday have a very strategic outlook, and the reality is, is that it needs to start now. If you want a successful Black Friday, you can't start in October, and you can't even start in September. You need to be starting your planning and getting your account right now in August to make sure that you are going to see the most profitable Black Friday that you have had on record for your brand. So that's why in this video I invited Brent Neal, one of our Defined Digital Academy coaches, so we can have an open discussion. And what we wanted to do in this video is we want to really break down what you need to be doing in August what you need to be doing in September, what you need to be doing in October, and then of course what you need to be doing in November to make sure that this is going to be the best Black Friday Cyber Monday that your brand has ever had. So why don't you sit down and concentrate and take note of this discussion of how you can have the best Black Friday ever for your brand.

All right, welcome back. We've got Brent. Many of you know Brent. He's our head e-commerce coach here at Define Digital Academy. So Brent, it's a pleasure.

Always happy to have you on the channel.

Hey, hey. Good to be here.

We're recording this 29th of July. This is going to be going live the first week of August, maybe the second week of August. But what we wanted to do here is we wanted to give a real break, break, month by month breakdown of how you're instructing clients and members of what you should be doing every month as we lead into this really, really crucial part for many e-commerce brands. So let's start with August and what you're sort of recommending right now for brands to be doing to make sure they get the most out of the Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And also end of year season.

Yep. Awesome. So to start with August, we kind of have to start at the end and then we can start with August moving forward, which is Black Friday. What's our main goal? How, like, what defines a successful Black Friday? For most brands, it really comes down to new customer acquisition and trying to get in as many, especially people that have been sussing out the brand for so long. And with obviously some pretty attractive sale prices, it might just be that little straw that breaks the camel's back. So that's one portion of it. But the second portion is most brands want to have a level of profitability there as well. You don't want to go straight towards the reds during one of your biggest sale periods of the year. So efficiency is also really key. When we look at the general breakdown for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, most brands notice that their return customer sales will heavily increase. And that's just mostly because emails, people are repurchasing from brands that they know and trust at a decent, decent sort of discount. It's much more attractive. And the most important thing is return customers during those periods are going to be the most efficient. So when we're trying to kill two birds with one stone, what we're really trying to do is increase our potential for return customers coming back, which means new customers now. And then we can start to focus on how do we get a bit of everyone towards the end of November. So starting with August, August and October are the two months where I, so August and September are the two months that I heavily recommend new customer acquisition is the key and primary focus. For most of the year when it comes to Google Ads. That's generally my recommendation anyway. But the theory then is anyone that you get through the doors today as a new customer increases the chance of getting them as a repeat purchase in November for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So what we're really trying to do right now is trying to build either one, a bit more brand awareness and consideration, which we know can take a bit of time to warm up customers. So that will still pay off to some extent in Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But most importantly is focused on new customer acquisition for August and September. Yeah. So that can be typically done through shopping, search, demand gen, PMAX. Everything is a little bit different based on the brand. So there's no rule. Yeah.

And I love the point that you give that.

Yeah.

I love the point you give there, especially about remembering that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, a lot of the play is reselling to your current people. And what I always talk to brands about is just remember you're even on your own buying cycle. Like if you've got a brand that you know and trust and it's September or October, if it's not urgent, you're going, hey, I'll just wait till November because I know there's a fair chance that there's going to be a deal on the table throughout that period. Yep.

Hey, we're going to get you right back to the interview with Brent very, very soon. But if you would like to have a Defined Digital Academy coach like Brent giving you expert input and also making sure that you're going to have the most successful Black Friday that you've ever had, why don't you apply for our on-demand program? Our on-demand program is our done with model where we come alongside you and give you the exact strategic steps that you need to get right so that you can grow your e-commerce brand with Google Ads. We created On Demand specifically for you, the brand owner who is ready to scale to next levels of revenue and profit for your brand. And the best thing about On Demand is that there is no group setting, so you're not going to be sitting on a group coaching call, and all of your communications are going to be private. Now, the, the benefit of that is that means that you can give us the exact data and we can give you the exact steps, which is tailored for your business and your brand, so that you can see the best success with Google Ads. Now, the one thing that all of our On Demand customers have in common is that when they join On Demand, their next Black Friday is the best Black Friday season they've ever had. And that's what I want to see for you, your business, and your brand this year.. So if you would like to have your best ever Black Friday this year in 2026, why don't you apply for On Demand below so that we can jump on a call and really take you through the step-by-step process of how On Demand is going to be the best thing for your business and your brand. So, but right now, let's get back to the interview, but just follow that link in the description below so that you can find out more information and apply for On Demand right now. See ya.

So just to reinforce what you're saying there is you're really going through September— sorry, through August and September to really focus on that new acquisition cycle so that you can get some new customers coming in. If you don't even get that new customer coming in, at least you've got the brand awareness going so that when we do launch the full sale in November, that you're not getting them fresh. You're already coming in. So they may not have purchased from you yet, but at least they know you and they know that they're one of the brands, one of the products that they want to try and try out and look to convert to.

100%. It's just like a bucket, right? You're trying to fill out the bucket. That's the simplest analogy I think most marketers would use when it comes to top of funnel advertising.

Yeah. And it's the one thing that we always sort of say is too many times, especially when you're on brand side or in business side of the advertising spectrum, we expect our customers to behave differently to how we do when we are buying something. So that's why I always let people like brand owners know is just take a think about, 'cause the biggest thing is, oh, we've been running ads, especially for someone who's first running ads. We've been running ads, we've promoted, we've put the sale, we can see people are going to the, adding to the cart, but they're not buying. And it's only been like 1 day or 2 days. I've got stuff in my cart sometimes for 7 days to 14 days, 20, you know, 4 weeks before I go through go through and make that purchase. So the thing that I sort of give is don't think that your customers are going to act any different to how you go through and make a purchase online.

100%. And I think it's probably— that's a really good point because the amount of times even I, I feel like I'm a very slow purchaser. Like I take a lot of time to consider a lot of my purchases and then someone will show me some random, I don't know, thing that I absolutely don't need and I'll purchase it right there and on the spot. I'm sporadic. I'm a little bit different when it comes to that. So, but that, that is exactly what a lot of the market will do as well. They know what they— I know probably 5 items that I know I'm going to purchase within the next month or so. I know exactly what they are. The only reason I haven't done it is because I haven't been in the right, I guess, mood or mindset or whatever it might be. Like, I know that there's going to be things there. So just because people don't purchase immediately doesn't mean that it's not playing a role. It's doing its job. There's just a little bit more faith. It's not as immediate as what someone searching for your brand and converting is. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and I, I think the fallacy of people just think that people seeing an ad, clicking on it, seeing the product for the first time and purchasing right there and then on the first day doesn't happen as as much as we think it does happen.

Like 0.01%, I reckon.

And that's what I think.

Always come back and think about how do you personally buy products and remember that, you know, the amount of time to— and then you've got to start thinking about obviously the higher the purchase cost, generally the longer the time. Also as well, whether it's an urgent item or a luxury item. So even if it's not as high of a cost, but it's a discretionary spend, that can also take longer to actually go through and make that purchase. Because it may not even be a money thing, but it's just like, do I really want to spend $50 on this thing that I probably don't need but will be pretty cool?

So exactly, it's a comparative thing.

Yeah. Great. All right. So that's August. September is much changing or you're pretty much just doubling down following that, uh, what you're talking about in September, in August.

I think most brands would probably agree with me when I say this is September is, you notice a bit of a weird dip in September. So September is usually maintaining, if not, it's just trying to fine tune any sort of top of funnel efforts that we have going in August and not necessarily pulling back. But really trying to identify, okay, cool, which creators are working really well, whether it's demand gen or whether you've got PMAX campaigns running with display ads and breaking down what creators seem to work really well and really starting to think about the creative planning that you want to take someone through over the next 2 months. So I think September is more so an analytical month more than it is a scale up and hold on tight type of month. Yeah.

Now, now we're not going to be talking too much about offers because as we see, that's another different different conversation. But internally, are you doing any testing? So if they're brand owner or the brand, they know they've got an offer they want to run. Are they, along with the creatives, are they testing that to maybe a segment of their database or a segment of their market? Or what are you recommending there?

In terms of the actual promotion itself?

Yeah, the actual promotion.

Yeah.

Are you talking about the Black Friday? I'm guessing it's going to be a separate thing.

Yeah.

So if you're going, this is what we want to be running in Black Friday, especially if it's a new promotion that they haven't run previously.

Yeah.

Yeah. Are you running any testing of that promotion at all?

No, no, definitely not. Yeah.

No, it's more, it's, it's more around the creatives.

Yeah. I think this is, I've done this with a few brands over the course of years as well. And just about every single time it's never really worked out that well where we had this bit of a situation where people or brands were advertising their Black Friday sub one, their deals earlier and earlier every single year. And that was quite simply just to make sure that they were the first in the door. People saw their offer. Before everyone else to the point where I had brands that advertised Black Friday, Sub Monday in October, and that failed so hard. It was horrible. So I think where we're starting to find, all right, great. 3 weeks, really 2 weeks before Black Friday is about the sweet spot between when you should really start advertising your promotions and trying to get that out there. Like that's the absolute maximum really that I'd be going. But again, that's a bit more of a talk about what is your promotion? How do you go about your promotions to do further markdowns and How do you go about that? But I typically wouldn't be doing any, even in the first week, usually the first two weeks of November, it's really not focused on promoting the offer. It's much more about building the audiences and preparing people, our website visitors and remarketing pools. Yeah.

All right. So August is obviously really starting to look for new acquisition that's going into September as well, but you're adding, also adding in some creative testing in there. When we start flipping over until October, Is that when we're starting to really start thinking about, look, we need to start scaling up spends and we, you know, what are you doing inside of the Google Ads account?

Yeah. So we all know that Google is a bit of a slow learn platform and it's also not a sporadic, hey, let's just ramp up our spend today and immediately it's going to start performing. It is a slow learn process. So October is where I, um, you know, for the users or for the, um, you know, the marketers that have seen the graphs where you can see, uh, Google usually sends it through to most of their brands every year, which is generic versus brand searches. And you can see that the the volume searches is November and late-ish October. You can see this increase, increase, increase in generic searches. And then during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday week, it pretty much crashes and then brand completely spikes through the roof. People are doing that research before Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I've known people that build lists of brands that they want to, you know, shop at and any known sales that they are going to have. Like they do a lot of, a lot of research beforehand. So October is that period where we want to start increasing our more generic, non-brand related, in-market, and info-seeking specific campaigns. So that'd be for search and shopping and demand gen. So YouTube primarily is another really big one. So anything that drives value, I'd be more education focused, more value focused, nothing that is too heavy towards CTAs and, you know, say Shorts, for example. Shorts, I would typically save more so for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I'm more social about brand awareness and trying to build a bit more value behind the brand and the products so that when it does get around towards that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, they already are eager to purchase from you or at least have a fond perception of your brand.

Yeah, and I think you hit a good point there. And it's now because Black Friday, Cyber Monday, especially for the first couple of years of even the first sort of 5, 6 years of it coming out, there was the bit of the novelty there. Whereas now it's very much becoming, I guess, ingrained into people's behavior. And you're saying, you know, with the data trends that once again come back to what I sort of said earlier is remember when you're actually paying for the ads and you're doing the marketing is don't forget how you go through and search and buy for things. So you are, once again, we are already starting to have the conversation, some things that, you know, we need to buy in the house. We're just gonna wait till November. We've already got, we don't have an actual list, but we've already got back in the head, these are the items that we want to buy. We're gonna wait. We sign up to their database and we are gonna wait for the Black Friday sales to, to come out. So that's where, but there's a really good data point that you brought out is remembering that we actually see the data in Google that the non-brand generic terms peak up. Is that late October?

Yeah, it's about late October it starts. Yeah.

And then at about second week of November, that drops down and then the, the brand sales go up.

Yeah, it's basically to the day where most brands go on sale, the actual start of Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That's pretty much exactly the day that it just completely dies. Yeah.

So through October, I mean, obviously this is going to be different for every brand. How much are you looking to ramp up their spend in terms of what's relative to what they're going to be spending at the peak of Black Friday?

I always bring it back down to, again, every, every client's a little bit different, but probably the biggest difference here is their expectations and their threshold of understanding that the money we spend today probably won't pay out until not just a month, but sometimes a month and a half later. So if you are going to be ramping things up in October, expect that your reportable results won't be amazing and very much bank on the fact that your Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale period will be better than it could have been before. So there's a level of trust if you don't have the right measurement process in play, which most brands probably aren't at that spend level to be using the whole tech stack with MMs and all that sort of stuff as well. They can be really expensive. So for smaller brands, I think probably the biggest thing is focus on engagement. That's probably the biggest indicator that you're getting, you're filling the bucket per se with qualified audiences is how long people are spending on your website. How many pages per session are they spending on your website? Are you getting a lot of soft conversions such as add to carts and begin checkouts or email signups, like anything that you can sort of demonstrate, yes, you are building that pipeline. That's a really good sign for a strong Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So more so assess your top of funnel, non-conversion focused efforts on that. When it comes to shopping and search, I think probably the biggest or the easiest way to, uh, or KPI to keep to is just accept to say a 20% haircut on whatever your typical ROAS is and be okay with scaling at that, even if that's breakeven or maybe just a little bit negative for that period, because you're really trying to get those people to purchase again in about a month's time. That's your, your main goal when it comes to doing customer acquisition in October.

All right.

So obviously August, September, you're going through really starting to, to build up new, new, new people into your brand, new people into your, I guess, awareness funnel. September, you go into testing. October, you're really looking at getting those soft signals and those early acquisition signs coming in. Yeah. Let's move into game time, November.

Yep.

We've spoken about October. As we said, that's really gonna be going over into that first couple weeks of November.

Yeah.

When we, when it comes to actual November in terms of where full spend, can you just talk through some specific tactics that you use? 'Cause one of the things that I always talk about brands is not only about Black Friday, it's also about how you're gonna exit from Black Friday. So they've got their current stack of campaigns, which is working some search, shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, whatever they've got in there. It's going to be different for every brand. How are you directing the budget increases and are you using any new campaigns? I know internally we like to use promotional campaigns, but when are you rolling out or launching new campaigns?

Yeah, this one's, uh, this one's interesting. So when I've always been a big advocate of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each platform, I'm not going to try and make a platform work even though I know it's a major weakness of that platform. So I'm not going to say, hey, let's launch a only shopping campaign with a huge budget and expect that that's going to perform even slightly as well as what a Meta campaign will. Simply put, Meta will crush Google in 9 times out of 10, at least. It will crush Google when it comes to sale periods. So I most of the time recommend to my clients, hey, whatever budget you were going to put towards Google, put a majority of that towards Meta, please, because it simply will just do better. Has more tools equipped for it. However, if you have an account that has very strong demand gen YouTube account data, so demand gen can take a fair while for people that haven't really used it before to gain the data insights and learnings to really start warming up. If this is pretty much the only time where you're really running demand gen, you'll probably notice that the first like 4 days of demand gen is really slow. Yeah. Like I'm talking tens of clicks sort of slow sometimes. So It's not your biggest bet, but if you already do have a fair bit of data, demand gen for sure. Shorts, I'd be looking at introducing as many shorts as I can because that's much more of an action-driven platform. But typically speaking, first week of November, continually increasing the non-brand efforts. So trying to build that pool through demand gen, search, and shopping, middle of funnel type efforts. Same for second week of November. Third week of November, I'd usually like to introduce some demand gen campaigns. With some of the value-based creators that we might run throughout the year. That's typically to get the demand gen campaigns warmed up a little bit. And also because a lot of evergreen, non-brand-focused creators can actually perform really well during sale periods. A lot of the time they're actually some of the top performers. And then that's where I'll typically introduce a lot of my, my brand creators in the fourth week of November when Black Friday, Cyber Monday kicks off.

We were talking, I was going to say offline, but it was online, but before we pressed record.

Always on Black Friday.

Yeah. Because I know, like obviously in previous years, you and I were both really big advocates of during Black Friday launching a, you know, just a separate Performance Max campaign.

Yes. Yeah.

No, no target ROAS, just maximize conversion value. That was really where we could add in some extra budget.

Yeah.

I'm still an advocate for that.

Yeah. Yeah.

I was going to say this year's— you go.

I'm still very much of an advocate for it. I think that's just more of a, foundational thing. It's more of a, I would always do that. Always have promotion assets in, depending on what the sale is and how it's set up, but promotion assets in Google Merchant Center. I would always recommend either a test of maximize conversion value or very low target ROAS on shopping campaigns. I still do think that they earn its place, but not always in a lot of cases, not usually the best dollar spent.

So it's a smaller allocation, but also knowing that we know that Performance Max is just going to continue to remarket people again and again. So it comes back to what you were saying before that if you've done the hard work through, you know, August, September, October, you've got a bigger pool there. You are going to get a big kick, but understand that that is going to be a very short sugar hit. That, and that's why we, I guess, essentially like the Performance Max as a promotional campaign because after Black Friday we can turn it off and we don't care about it anymore. Like it's not a long-term campaign for us. It's very much just kind of a mop up, pick up everything to make sure that we aren't leaving, you know, wasted. So we aren't leaving any unused spend on the table.

Yeah, 100%. And the way I like to look at this is like a bit of a real world analogy is August, September is more so your, imagine like a sales team, right? You've got your marketers. You're trying to build as many leads as you possibly can in August, September. In October, it's more so, and early November, it's more so qualifying, see who is actually keen on XYZ service. And then if you've done well enough in those two areas, your salespeople are going to have a field day during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And that's where I'll consider Meta to be or other platforms like that, that can promote really, really well. EDM, stuff like that.

Yeah.

They will have a field day because you built the pipeline as healthy as it possibly can without blowing the P&Ls along the way. Yeah.

And I guess probably what the biggest take home from this is, and I don't, I think now no one really thinks like this, is that Black Friday is an event and it's essentially, uh, you know, a 1 to 2 week period, however it runs, but it, it, you can't run into it thinking, oh, I'm just going to target that event. I think those days are long gone. You've really got to have a strategic plan, a couple of months build up to it to really make sure you're getting the best out of it.

1000%. Yeah. And yeah, I think probably the biggest thing here is because you can't measure it doesn't mean it doesn't happen because Google is a very slow ramp up period. And these are a lot of efforts that people aren't just going to see an ad one time purchase. See you later. Yeah. I think a lot of people do favor, hey, let's just go crazy on say Meta. Where you can spend insane amounts within one day and it immediately performs because you can see how that affects the bottom line immediately. But how do you know how much of that bottom line, if you didn't do Google, how much of that bottom line wouldn't have been as high as what it was? So yeah, I think that's probably the biggest one where if you don't have the right tools to be able to measure that, I guess properly, it can become a bit of a trust game. So yeah, I think every brand needs to experiment at least with that.

Yeah.

And we're obviously a big thing we also look at too is, is, you know, especially unless this is your first time going through Black Friday, is really to look to take the learnings from the previous year and then you can just build on a playbook year after year to really get the longevity in your brand.

Yeah, 100%.

All right, Brent, thank you so much. As always, pleasure to have you to come on and share your insights and you can now go into your dark office and we'll see you on the other end of Black Friday.

No dark offices here. No dark offices. It'll be outside.

I'm in the dark office, so it's probably the other way.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to say flip it around. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me.