Running a full-funnel e-commerce account through BFCM week

You run a full-funnel e-commerce account through BFCM week in three stages. In early November you build demand with prospecting campaigns. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday week you capture it with sales campaigns, and in December you close the remaining sales with remarketing. In 2026, Black Friday falls on November 27 and Cyber Monday on November 30. That is how Tony Adam, CEO of the agency Visible Factors, describes it in an article for Search Engine Journal published on November 2, 2026. Below is an overview of his recommendations, also based on Google and Meta documentation.

Why do you need to fill the funnel before Black Friday?

You need to fill the funnel early, because during BFCM week every seller in the category competes for the same customers. According to Tony Adam, in his accounts most Q4 conversions come from people who discovered the store weeks or months earlier.

That is why November is the time to expand prospecting, meaning campaigns that reach new audiences. The more people enter the funnel before Black Friday, the larger the group you can later persuade to buy. Google Trends shows seasonal spikes in interest in a category from previous years.

A Meta ad set usually exits the learning phase after about 50 results within a week of its last significant edit. According to Meta, ad sets in the learning phase perform less steadily and usually have a higher cost per result. Frequent budget changes can send an ad set back into that phase, which is why budgets are raised gradually.

Changing target ROAS before the peak affects both the cost and the value of sales. The difference between ROAS and the return on the whole investment is explained in the definition of ROI.

How do you prepare your offer and Merchant Center?

You need to settle the offer before BFCM week, because creative, campaigns and Merchant Center settings all depend on it. Merchant Center promotions let you mark an offer as being for new customers.

Google shows such an offer to people it considers likely to be new customers. This does not guarantee, however, that existing customers won't see it.

The sale_price attribute lets Google show a struck-through price and a sale annotation. The author gives the requirements for the US market: a discount of 5% to 90% and a regular price used for at least 5 of the last 30 days.

In Poland, every price reduction notice must also show the lowest price from the 30 days before the reduction. This follows from Article 4(2) of the Polish act on displaying the prices of goods and services, amended to implement the Omnibus Directive.

The obligation applies wherever the promotion is presented, including ads on third-party sites. In January 2026, the President of UOKiK (the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection) fined Zalando nearly PLN 31 million and Temu nearly PLN 6 million for such violations.

Zalando failed to show the lowest 30-day price in places that included ads on third-party sites. The office also objected to it calculating discounts from a “regular” price instead of the lowest 30-day price. Before BFCM, you should therefore check the discount amounts in your creative, on your website and in your product feed.

This part of the article is for information only and does not constitute legal advice.

Without a time zone, Google treats promotion dates as running from midnight to 23:59 UTC. In Poland, on winter time (UTC+1), the promotion would therefore start at 1:00 a.m. A Polish store can write the date as 2026-11-27T00:00+0100/2026-12-01T00:00+0100.

How do you run campaigns during BFCM week?

During BFCM week the goal is to capture the demand built in November at the expected revenue and return on ad spend. Campaigns then need budget headroom and promotion information for Smart Bidding.

According to Google, a campaign can spend up to twice its average daily budget on a single day. Over a month, however, spend won't exceed 30.4 times the average daily budget. Overspending right before Black Friday can therefore limit delivery on the most important days.

A seasonality adjustment is used only in campaigns with conversion history. Its value is best set from data from previous years. If Black Friday usually converted twice as well as the November average, that is the change you enter in the adjustment. After the adjustment window ends, bids return to normal on their own.

Before BFCM week it is also worth checking for errors that can stop sales:

• disapproved products and errors in the product feed;
• a promotion visible on the website but missing from the ads;
• a price mismatch between the product feed and the website;
• broken conversion tracking;
• budget-limited campaigns that are hitting their target.

Conversion tracking is often set up through Google Tag Manager. When it breaks, you need to fix it and exclude the data from the outage period. According to Google, the exclusion should cover at least 90% of clicks from that period.

The author considers higher CPMs in Meta, a single weaker ROAS day or budget shifting in Performance Max to be normal at the peak. He recommends postponing the analysis of these changes until December 2.

What should you do with your e-commerce account in December?

In December the account closes sales with the audiences built in November. According to the author, early December brings less competition than Black Friday itself, which favors a higher ROAS.

The warmest group is people who visited the store during BFCM week and didn't buy anything. Remarketing to them works better when it leans on pre-holiday delivery dates rather than further discounts. This doesn't train customers to wait for the next wave of price cuts.

After the promotion ends, the conversion rate drops. According to the author, bids can be too high for a few days, but they usually settle on their own. That is why, after restoring your targets, it's worth waiting a few days before making further changes.

New customers from early December are the first measure of how well the whole funnel worked. The author recommends discussing this data in the January season review.

We run Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns for stores as performance marketing. You can check whether purchase tracking works before BFCM with the free GA4 audit. How to split a budget between channels is covered in our article on how much to spend on Google Ads and Meta Ads.

What sources is this article based on?

The author describes the Merchant Center promotion and pricing rules based on Google's guidelines for merchants. The observations described come from accounts managed by the agency Visible Factors and may differ in other industries.

The Polish requirements for price reductions are described in the UOKiK President's guidance “Informacja o obniżce ceny” (Information on price reductions) and on the UOKiK website Prawa konsumenta (Consumer rights). The fines for Zalando and Temu are reported in a UOKiK press release of January 12, 2026.