Black Friday 2026: your full checklist
Black Friday 2026 is on 27 November. Get ready with our free interactive checklist: 84 tasks across 7 phases, from offer strategy to Cyber Week and beyond.
Carla7 October 202611 min readBlack Friday falls on 27 November this year. By the time the first discount goes live, the important decisions have been made: which products are worth discounting, whether your tracking can be trusted, and whether your campaigns have had enough time to learn.
Every year we see teams that start in November spending the peak putting out fires.
To help you get prepared, we’ve turned our own Black Friday playbook into an interactive checklist. It covers 84 tasks across seven phases, from setting your offer and margins eight weeks out, through feed optimisation, Performance Max warm-up and creative production, all the way to live monitoring during Cyber Week and the post-mortem in December.
A few things to know before you start:
- Follow the timeline. Each phase shows when it should be done. If you’re reading this late, focus on tracking and your product feed first, since everything else depends on them.
- Adapt it to your markets. If you sell across several countries, most tasks need doing once per market, not once in total.
Whether you manage everything in-house or work with an agency, use it as a shared reference so nothing falls through the cracks.
Your Black Friday 2026 checklist
0 of 84 tasks done
Phase 1: Strategy and offer8 to 6 weeks out
Decide what you are selling, to whom, and at what margin before you touch a single campaign.
Offer and margins
Markets and targets
Budget and stock
Phase 2: Tracking and product feed6 to 4 weeks out
If your data is wrong, every bidding algorithm will optimise towards the wrong thing during the most expensive week of the year.
Tracking
Product feed and Merchant Center
Phase 3: Campaign setup and audience warm-up4 to 2 weeks out
Build everything before the rush and give algorithms time to learn: campaigns launched on Black Friday morning start blind.
Google Ads, Shopping and Performance Max
Social Ads
Programmatic and other channels
Phase 4: Creative bankReady before the creative freeze
Plan three creative waves (teaser, launch and last chance) so your ads never fatigue during the peak.
Phase 5: Website and conversion readiness2 weeks out
Every euro you spend on ads is wasted if your site slows down or your checkout leaks buyers on the big day.
Performance and stability
Landing pages and checkout
Customer service
Phase 6: Launch week and Cyber Week27 to 30 November
During the peak, your job is to watch, react fast and move budget towards what converts.
The day before launch
Live monitoring
Cyber Monday and the final hours
Phase 7: After Black FridayDecember
The real profit comes from turning Black Friday buyers into repeat customers, and from learning for next year.
Retention
Post-mortem