Mauricio Martinez
November 19, 2025
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(Unless You Read This)
Here’s what nobody tells you about Black Friday advertising: while you’re busy planning discounts and updating your website, your competitors are already outbidding you for every customer you’re about to chase.
Last Black Friday, average CPCs jumped 140% in retail categories. Small businesses with “we’ll figure it out” strategies watched their ad budgets evaporate by noon while competitors who planned ahead were printing money. The difference between winning and losing Black Friday isn’t your discount percentage. It’s whether you know how to weaponize your ad spend before everyone else floods the platforms.
This isn’t another “best practices” guide. This is what actually works when CPCs are skyrocketing, competition is brutal, and every dollar needs to fight like it’s worth ten.
Every year, the same thing happens. Small businesses set their “normal” budgets, launch their campaigns, and by Thursday afternoon they’re burned through their entire monthly ad spend with nothing to show for it.
Why? Because they’re competing against brands with unlimited budgets who’ve been warming up audiences since October. While you’re just launching your first Black Friday ad, major retailers have already spent weeks testing creatives, segmenting audiences, and identifying exactly which campaigns will print money.
The CPCs you’re comfortable with? Triple them. The audience sizes that usually work? They’re now saturated with competitors. The conversion rates you rely on? Cut them in half because customers are comparison shopping harder than ever.
But here’s where it gets interesting. While everyone’s fighting the same battle in the same places, there are specific strategies that let smaller budgets compete and win. You just need to know where the big players aren’t looking and how to make every dollar count twice.
Let’s start with where most people screw this up. They launch broad match keywords with generic ad copy and wonder why they’re paying $12 per click for traffic that bounces.
Google Ads during Black Friday is a knife fight. You’re not just competing with other small businesses. You’re up against Amazon, Walmart, and every major retailer with budgets that make yours look like lunch money. Going head-to-head with them on broad terms is financial suicide.
The play? Hyper-specific long-tail keywords that big brands ignore. Instead of “Black Friday deals,” you’re bidding on “best waterproof hiking boots Black Friday Canada under $200.” The search volume is smaller, but the intent is nuclear and the competition is a fraction of what you’d face on generic terms.
Google Shopping Ads are where the real money is if you’re in e-commerce. But here’s what nobody does right: they upload their entire catalog and let Google figure it out. Wrong. You need to ruthlessly prioritize your highest-margin products that can actually compete on price, then structure campaigns around those specific SKUs with aggressive negative keywords to block garbage traffic.
And here’s the move almost nobody makes: start running your campaigns two weeks early at lower budgets. Why? Because Google’s algorithms need conversion data to optimize. If you launch Thursday morning with a fresh campaign, you’re burning budget while the algorithm learns. Launch early, feed it data, then scale when it matters.
Our Google Ads strategies are built around aggressive profit margins, not vanity metrics. We’ve managed over $500,000 in ad spend and know exactly which levers to pull when CPCs spike and competition gets nasty.
Most businesses treat Meta Ads like a spray-and-pray awareness play. They target broad interests, show ads to cold audiences, and wonder why their ROAS is underwater.
Here’s what actually works: Meta is your retargeting weapon, not your acquisition channel.
Start building your retargeting audiences right now. Every single person who visits your site between now and Black Friday should be cookied and segmented based on behavior. Product page viewers. Cart abandoners. People who spent more than 2 minutes on site. High-value past customers. These are your money audiences.
Then you create separate campaigns for each segment with specific messaging. Cart abandoners see “You left something behind, here’s 20% off to finish checkout.” Product viewers see dynamic ads showing exactly what they looked at plus similar items. Past customers see “VIP early access to our Black Friday deals.”
The psychology here is critical. Cold audiences need 7-12 touchpoints before they buy. Retargeting audiences already know you, they’re just deciding if the deal is good enough. Your job is to create urgency and remove objections, not build awareness from scratch.
Video ads are criminally underused on Meta during Black Friday. A 15-second video showing your product, customer reactions, and your Black Friday offer will destroy static images in the feed. People scroll past images, but video makes them stop. And stopping is half the battle when everyone’s feed is flooded with ads.
The big unlock? Dynamic product ads with your Black Friday pricing automatically pulled from your catalog. Someone looks at a specific item on your site, they immediately start seeing that exact product in their feed with your sale price and a countdown timer. It’s automated, scalable, and it converts like crazy because it’s hyper-personalized.
Want to see how we structure Meta Ads campaigns that actually drive ROAS instead of just spending budget? We’ve cracked the code on retargeting strategies that turn browsers into buyers.
While every other business is dumping money into Google and Meta, there’s an interesting opportunity on platforms most people ignore: Reddit and TikTok.
Reddit users are actively looking for recommendations. They’re in buying mode, they trust community opinions, and they’re way less saturated with Black Friday ads than Facebook or Google. The trick is finding subreddits where your ideal customers hang out and running ads that feel native to the platform.
Reddit ads work best when they don’t feel like ads. Create content that looks like a genuine recommendation post, use conversational copy, and target specific communities where people are actually asking for product recommendations in your category. The CPCs are a fraction of what you’ll pay on Google, and the quality of traffic is often better because these people are actively researching purchases.
TikTok is where younger audiences live, and they’re completely underserved by most small businesses during Black Friday. The platform is less competitive, CPCs are still reasonable, and if your creative is good, the algorithm will distribute your content aggressively.
The key on TikTok is making ads that don’t look like ads. User-generated content style videos, quick product demos, unboxing clips. Anything that feels authentic and native to the platform. Slap your Black Friday offer in the caption and drive to a landing page optimized for mobile because that’s where 100% of your TikTok traffic will land.
If Black Friday is your Super Bowl, you don’t show up on game day and start warming up. You’ve been training for weeks.
Start warming audiences immediately. Run low-budget campaigns right now to get your pixel firing, collect data, and start building those retargeting pools. Every visitor you capture now is someone you can hit with retargeting during Black Friday week.
Create your ad variations now and start testing. Don’t wait until Black Friday to figure out which creative converts. Test different hooks, offers, and CTAs at small budgets so you know what works before it matters.
Set up your tracking properly. This seems obvious but most businesses have broken pixels, misconfigured conversions, or can’t actually track which ads are driving profitable sales versus just clicks. If you can’t measure it accurately, you can’t optimize it.
Build separate landing pages for your Black Friday offers. Don’t send ad traffic to your homepage or generic product pages. Create dedicated landing pages with your offers front and center, urgency elements like countdown timers, and simplified checkout flows. The difference in conversion rates will pay for itself ten times over.
Most importantly, stress test your checkout process. The worst thing that can happen is running successful ads that drive massive traffic only to have your site crash or your checkout break under load. Test everything at volume before it matters.
Running Black Friday PPC campaigns isn’t like normal digital marketing. The stakes are higher, the competition is brutal, and mistakes cost serious money very quickly.
Most small business owners think they can DIY this. They’ll spend weeks learning the platforms, setting up campaigns, and trying to compete against people who manage millions in ad spend for a living. Then they’ll burn through their budget, get mediocre results, and convince themselves that “PPC just doesn’t work for us.”
The reality? PPC works incredibly well when you know what you’re doing. But there’s a massive gap between “I’ve run some Facebook ads” and “I can profitably scale spend during the most competitive week of the year.”
Professional management isn’t about having access to secret tools or hidden strategies. It’s about pattern recognition from managing campaigns through dozens of Black Fridays, knowing exactly what to do when things go wrong, and having systems to make profitable decisions at speed.
At Latin Launch, we’ve managed over $500,000 in ad spend across every major platform (Google and Meta). We know what works because we’ve tested everything, broken everything, and optimized everything. More importantly, we know what fails so you don’t have to learn those lessons with your own money.
We don’t do vanity metrics. We don’t care about clicks if they’re not profitable. We structure campaigns around ROAS, CAC, and actual business growth. And we’re completely transparent with data so you see exactly where every dollar goes and what it returns.
Black Friday 2025 is going to be the most competitive yet. More businesses competing, higher CPCs, and customers who are comparison shopping harder than ever because their budgets are tight.
You have two options. You can wing it with a “we’ll figure it out” approach and join the majority of businesses who burn money and generate mediocre results. Or you can execute with the precision of someone who’s done this successfully dozens of times.
If you want Black Friday to be a massive win instead of an expensive lesson, you need a real strategy executed by people who know exactly what they’re doing.
Book a free strategy call with us right now. We’ll audit your current setup, identify your biggest opportunities, and build a custom plan to maximize your Black Friday performance. No fluff, no generic advice, just a clear roadmap to profitable campaigns.
The businesses winning Black Friday are already executing their strategies. Don’t be the one scrambling on Thursday morning wondering why your ads aren’t working.
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