The holiday season is a prime time for advertising on Facebook. While higher competition means there’s often a steeper cost-per-click to pay, it can still be an ultra-rewarding time for ecommerce brands to advertise on the social media platform.
Plus, in recent years, Black Friday has gone from being a Thanksgiving distraction to one of the most important dates in any ecommerce business’s calendar.
Google Trends shows a steady increase in search popularity for Black Friday over time—except for a pandemic-related interruption.
Despite pandemic-related concerns around consumer spending cutbacks, Black Friday generated $9.8 billion in online sales in 2023. That’s up 7.5% from 2022, when inflation and rising costs were hitting consumers hard.
This presents an opportunity: how can your brand tap into one of the most important days of the year for ecommerce sales? Using Facebook Ads can be an effective way of converting more of your target audience. But to stand out in a sea of Black Friday ads, you’ll need to understand your target shopper and how to best reach them.
Let’s take a look at our complete guide to Black Friday Facebook ads.
Why should you advertise during Black Friday?
Other than the increase in sales, brands will need to advertise if they want their Black Friday deals to stand out––organic Facebook campaigns are no longer enough to get in front of your target audience.
Buyers are actively looking to purchase
Price-savvy shoppers wait months for Black Friday to make high-ticket purchases. They’re online and ready to shop, so it makes sense for retailers to target them.
In 2023, 130.7 million US shoppers said they planned to shop on Black Friday (compared to 71.1 million intending to shop on Cyber Monday).
Plus, consumers are increasingly looking to shop for Black Friday deals online. In 2023, online retail transactions skyrocketed +12.3% globally on Black Friday with a steady uplift from September +3.1% to +7% in November.
What’s more, 7 out of 10 millennials intended to shop online rather than in-store, making them the leading cohort in global ecommerce spending in 2023. In 2023, Black Friday was still the most popular day for online shopping, with roughly 90.6 million consumers shopping online, up from 87.2 million in 2022. In-store shopping also increased with 76.2 million shoppers visiting physical stores, up from 72.9 million in 2022.
FTI Consulting’s report aligns with these estimates, predicting double growth in online sales through 2025 than the rate of store-based sales growth.
Brands looking to have a profitable Black Friday and Cyber Monday need to actively target these hungry shoppers with Facebook ads.
Holiday shopping equals a huge percentage of annual sales
Black Friday is the biggest day in the retail calendar for a reason––it makes up a large proportion of annual sales. In the US, ecommerce sales on Black Friday reached $9.8 billion in a year when total ecommerce sales hit $1,118.7 billion––an increase of 7.6% from 2022. While that sounds like a small number, it’s still a lot for one day in the calendar year.
Mastercard’s SpendingPulse shows that on Black Friday:
- US retail sales (excluding automotive) grew 2.5% YoY.
- Ecommerce sales rose 8.5% YoY.
- In-store sales increased 1.1% YoY.
These results align with Adobe’s reported 7.5% YoY jump and Salesforce’s reported 9.0% YoY increase.
Different verticals and individual businesses may see better results depending on their customer base and products.
Opportunity to cross-sell and upsell stock
Black Friday is a great chance not only to move your bestsellers but also to shift some of those harder-to-sell products that have been sitting in your warehouse throughout the year. Brands can offer tempting discounts or bundle products together to make it easier to sell them.
In 2023, the number of orders increased by 18% while average order value decreased by 2%. This indicates that ecommerce brands had success in recommending other products. It also shows people made more purchases, but were still cognizant of how much they spent. In fact, 56% of shoppers didn’t buy as much as they’d have wanted because of inflation.
Use Black Friday as an opportunity to showcase your full range of products and consider cross-selling and upselling stock. This could be as simple as providing shoppers with a selection of recommended products or showcasing products at checkout.
For example, DTC cookware brand Great Jones upsells similar lower-priced goods when shoppers add products to their shopping baskets. This helps increase average order value and shift lower-value goods.
Advertise to new and existing audiences
Black Friday is an ideal moment to advertise to and convert new shoppers. In fact, for smaller brands, first-time buyers represented 58% of Black Friday spending and 27% for consumers who have purchased three or more times.
People are open to purchasing from unfamiliar brands and making impulse buys. Tap into these preferences and use your Black Friday promos as a chance to reach new audiences.
Six tips for running successful Black Friday Facebook Ads
To achieve success with your Black Friday campaigns, you’ll need a solid advertising strategy in place. Here are six tips to get you started.
1. Start planning early ahead of Black Friday weekend
Planning ahead helps your brand get ahead of the competition. Strive to own all of November instead of focusing just on the actual day or even the entire Black Friday weekend. The key here is to put some budget aside to entice your target shoppers before the holiday shopping frenzy begins.
Bidding before Black Friday will be cheaper. You’ll save some of your ad budget and have more chances to get in front of your target audience. This will also help you grow audiences for retargeting campaigns, which you can use on or after Black Friday.
By warming up your target audience before Black Friday, and then retargeting them later, you’ll see your ROAS increase too.
Brands with larger budgets can start prospecting with ads as early as October. That’s what premium luggage brand The Shrine did with their ads related to Black Friday in October 2023.
Loop in your customers early. Share with them your plans for each day or week of the month, like what Sun Potion did with their Black Friday presale.
Run targeted Black Friday ads a month before the day to build an email list. This way, you can educate your audience about your brand and offer multiple offers and discounts during your campaign.
Create exclusive subscriber-only offers and discounts to grow your email list. Then, keep subscribers engaged throughout with valuable information and tips about your brand and product. Nurture a relationship with them before trying to sell to them on Black Friday.
2. Refine your target audiences
You need to be in front of people most likely to find your offering relevant and make a purchase. For the best chance of success with your Black Friday campaigns, refine your target audiences.
Start by creating custom audiences from your brand’s email lists. Then, based on these groups, you can build lookalike audiences. These help you reach new customers who are similar to your existing ones.
This means you’ll reach people more likely to be interested in your offers and shoppers who may make impulse purchases.
Take ChicMe, for example. The fashion brand has a strong ecommerce presence across the globe, but they wanted an alternative solution to the broad audience targeting strategy. The company used Facebook lookalike audiences on their highest-value customers to cost-effectively increase customer reach and website sales.
Through first-party data and targeting high-value customers based on recency, frequency, and monetary value segmentation, ChicMe boosted their campaign performance with incremental purchases, achieving:
- 82% lower cost per conversion
- 3.7 times higher ROAS
- 13% higher CTRs
- 14% higher add-to-cart completion
The key is to make sure your Black Friday ads are targeted to select audiences. For example, The Record Hub made sure their audience was set to people in Ireland due to the location of the store's flagship.
Without properly targeting ads to groups of audience demographics, you risk burning through your Facebook ad campaign budget with little to no results.
3. Cross-promote your offers
Black Friday is a great moment to cross-promote multiple products and offers via Facebook ads. Instead of only showing your audience one offer, why not maximize your efforts and display several items and offers?
With the start of the holiday season, consider being extra generous and giving your shoppers a free gift.
For example, FCTRY, a product design studio, used the carousel ad format to cross-promote different products from their apparel line and offer a free action figure to shoppers. The brand spent less than $100 on the campaign, targeting an estimated audience size of 100,000-500,000 people.
4. Optimize ad formats
In 2022, it was estimated that, for the first time, consumers would spend more than four in 10 retail ecommerce dollars on mobile. In 2024, retail m-commerce sales are forecast to reach over $558 billion and account for 7.4% of total retail sales in the US.
Increasing time spent on smartphones will trickle into shopping. To tap into mobile shopping trends, brands should make their Black Friday Facebook ads mobile friendly. This means giving them a portrait orientation, providing large tappable buttons, ensuring the text is large enough to be read on a small phone screen, and avoiding clutter so visitors can see the image properly.
For example, the apparel brand Crowned Free used a portrait video ad styled to suit mobile viewing.
5. Avoid editing campaigns midway
Once you’ve set up your Black Friday campaign, avoid making any changes to it midway through. If you edit any part of the creative, imagery, or text, or if you change your audience targeting, the Facebook algorithm starts its learning phase about your ad all over again.
During your ad’s learning phase, Facebook makes modifications to the ad’s delivery to ensure it’s seen by the people most likely to convert. This learning phase can take up to 50 conversions and, depending on the ad, can take some time.
Although this wouldn’t harm your ad strategy during any other time of year, for Black Friday, you have such a limited window you don’t want to reset this learning phase.
To avoid changing your ads once they’re running, triple-check them before hitting publish. Make sure there are no typos, your image format and sizing are correct, and you haven’t included too much text in your images.
6. Review your spending limit
Since CPC usually rises during Black Friday, you’ll likely need a higher budget to see you through your campaign. Make sure you carefully budget your ads so you don’t run out of money halfway through your campaign and your ads are forced to stop.
Clothing brand CISE made sure to budget their ads wisely. Despite showing their ads to a narrow demographic of people, the brand was able to limit their Black Friday Ad spend to $199 for three days.
Since the brand was only running ads for several days, they successfully created a sense of urgency among consumers to shop with the brand before their bags sell out.
7. Design a cohesive Facebook ad campaign
Black Friday is a key part of the winter holidays, which occur during an important sales quarter on the ecommerce and retail calendar. To capitalize on this season, brands can design Facebook ad creatives with a cohesive look and feel and run a series of campaigns ahead of, during, and right after Black Friday.
Sephora Spain, for example, ran a series of ad campaigns around Singles’ Day, Black Friday, and Christmas on Facebook and Instagram. The team wanted to boost brand awareness during this peak shopping season and establish Sephora as a trendsetter in the retail beauty industry that consistently meets their customers’ needs.
The video ads spotted a cohesive look and feel across other Facebook ad campaign placements, like Reels, Advantage+ catalog ads featuring Sephora products, and more.
Sephora achieved their campaign goal of boosting awareness and consideration during all three promotional dates, earning a three-point increase in brand preference for Black Friday.
8. Use Advantage+ shopping campaigns
Direct to consumer (DTC) and single-branded retailer brands can use Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns to increase reach and online sales. This type of campaign taps into machine learning to help advertisers reach valuable audiences with less setup time, greater personalization, and more efficiency.
Advantage+ shopping campaigns require fewer inputs during campaign creation and setup, simplify audience options, and streamline ad creative management. This eliminates the need for multiple campaigns with varying creative setups and targeting, giving brands more opportunities to reach potential buyers.
Damas Jewellery tested Advantage+ shopping campaigns in six markets in the Middle East before the key Black Friday sales period.
The jeweler wanted to maximize their ad efficiency on Meta apps and take advantage of automation and machine learning. So they ran A/B tests with a campaign using their usual Advantage+ catalog ads and Advantage+ shopping campaigns, displaying ads to consumers across the United Arab Emirates.
After adopting Advantage+ shopping campaigns, Damas Jewellery lowered their cost per purchase by 55% and increased reach by 5%.
Common issues to avoid during Black Friday
Your Facebook advertising strategy doesn’t need to be ultra-complex to get off the ground. But it’s important to nail a few basics before going all in with your campaigns.
1. Incomplete strategy
“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,” goes the famous expression. With Black Friday Facebook ads, this couldn’t ring truer. Without a solid strategy, it’ll be hard, if not impossible, to give your ads the edge they need to stand out from the crowd.
An incomplete strategy may mean:
- You run out of budget.
- You don’t target the right audience.
- The formatting of your ad creative is off.
Taking the time to build a solid Black Friday Facebook ads strategy is key to boosting your conversion rate during the holiday period.
2. Wrong targeting
Targeting the wrong audience demographics will mean your ads won’t get in front of the right people who may actually convert. Your ad could feature witty copy, top-quality imagery, and look great on both mobile and desktop—but if it’s not targeted to the right audience, it’s unlikely to have a high conversion rate.
Spend time defining your core target audience. How old are they? Where do they live? What profession do they have, and do they have specific hobbies?
Once you know what your custom audience looks like, tailor your ads to it. Then, let Facebook create lookalike audiences to get your ads in front of more people who will likely show interest.
3. Only focusing on promotions and discounts
By only considering your BFCM promos, you’re missing out on building genuine engagement with your audience.
While your discounts should be the centerpiece of your campaign, consider how your ad sets can build brand awareness too. It’s important to use eye-catching imagery and on-brand copy so Facebook users can connect with your ads.
If your ad is only about your promo for 40% off, you run the risk of not engaging any of your target audience.
Create an effective Black Friday Facebook Ads campaign
Use these examples of Black Friday Facebook ads to inspire your future marketing strategies. Before you create any Black Friday ads, make sure to define your target audience, budget, and promotions.
Then, stick to your campaign setup and avoid making any changes halfway through. Always review your campaign’s metrics from last year to see what you can improve when running ads this time.
No matter where you and your business are at in your journey, Shopify is here to help. Our robust set of marketing tools, built into our core platform, are designed to make it easy for you to get your products out to the world. So that when big events like Black Friday happen, you’re more than ready to rise to the occasion.
Learn more about how you can market your business on Shopify.
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Black Friday Facebook ad FAQ
How do I prepare for Black Friday ads on Facebook?
- Decide what type of Black Friday ad you want to run on Facebook. Consider using ads that promote discounts, special offers, and limited-time deals.
- Develop engaging content for your ad. Use visuals and compelling ad copy that will grab the attention of potential customers.
- Set up a budget for your Black Friday ads. Consider how much you’re willing to spend on each ad and make sure you’re not overspending.
- Target your audience. Make sure you’re targeting the right people for your Black Friday ads by creating an audience profile.
- Test your ads. Before you launch your Black Friday ads, make sure you’ve tested them to ensure they’re performing as expected.
- Monitor and optimize your ads. Keep an eye on your ads and make adjustments as needed to maximize your return on investment.
Should you run ads on Black Friday?
That depends on your business goals. If you're looking to generate more sales during the holiday season, running ads on Black Friday can be a smart decision. However, if you're looking to focus on brand awareness or are concerned about your budget, you may want to consider other strategies.
When should I start advertising for Black Friday?
Most recommendations suggest to start advertising for Black Friday at least two weeks before the event. This gives your customers plenty of time to plan their shopping and decide what they want to purchase. Additionally, it also gives you time to get your promotions and discounts in order, create ads, and optimize your website for the big day.
