8 Ways to Drive Sales from Black Friday Facebook Ads

Black Friday is a fantastic opportunity for ecommerce advertisers to skyrocket product sales and attract hordes of new customers. In 2022, US shoppers spent a mind-boggling $9.2B on online shopping during the Black Friday weekend, searching frantically for hot sales and big discounts.

However, while Black Friday can be hugely profitable, it’s also extremely chaotic.

As a Facebook marketer, you’ll be dealing with insane levels of competition, as rival brands pour eye-watering budgets into their campaigns and scramble to reach the same audiences.

If you think you can approach Black Friday like any other Facebook ad campaign, you’ll need to think again.

But don’t be disheartened.

To help you prepare for Black Friday and capitalize on sales fever, I’ve pulled together a set of expert strategies that will enable you to reach quality audiences, drive cost efficiency, and generate high-value conversions:

1. Lay down the groundwork before Black Friday kicks off
2. Be smart with audience segmentation
3. Launch eye-catching creative assets
4. Experiment with different ad formats to achieve superior performance
5. Use action-driving, sales-led copywriting techniques
6. Don’t hesitate to scale up successful strategies
7. Optimize your ad delivery to stay competitive
8. Avoid making last-minute changes to your Facebook Ads campaign

Best practices for Black Friday Facebook ads for ecommerce businesses

Follow these best practices, and you’ll be able to transform Black Friday madness into highly lucrative sales.

1. Lay down the groundwork before Black Friday kicks off

A lot of your most important work as a Facebook advertiser will actually take place before the sales even begin.

For example, if you wait until the Black Friday event begins to start generating website traffic, you’ll be miles behind the competition already. Instead, you need to focus on building up receptive, high-quality retargeting audiences in the lead-up to Black Friday weekend.

This all starts with the Facebook Pixel.

With the Facebook Pixel in place, you can begin to construct retargeting audiences based on customers who have engaged with your ads, visited your website, or purchased your products. These segments are known as Custom Audiences, and since they’re already familiar with your brand/products, they’re significantly more likely to convert.

(If you have a sizeable email list, you can also use customer email addresses to build a new Custom Audience on Facebook.)

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Custom Audiences can last for up to 180 days, so if you start driving traffic to your website in advance, you can hit the ground running on Black Friday. Rather than starting from scratch, you can immediately target hot prospect audiences that have previously engaged with your business, allowing you to maximize conversions–and fast.

You can also use Lookalike Audiences to expand your Custom Audience targeting, extending the reach of your campaign while still focusing on relevant consumers.

Black Friday is a ridiculously competitive period, so advertisers that can immediately focus on cost-efficient audiences will have a serious advantage.

🛑 Free guide >> The 16 Most Effective Strategies for Facebook Ads Success

2. Be smart with audience segmentation

As I’ve already mentioned, building up re-engagement and retargeting audiences ahead of Black Friday is key.

But it’s also important to segment these audiences effectively.

For example, users who have completed multiple purchases on your website in the last 60 days should be a high priority. These are existing customers who are clearly interested in your products and represent a massive revenue opportunity on Black Friday.

On the other hand, users who have previously viewed one of your videos may be curious about your products, but not quite ready to commit to a purchase.

Rather than treating all of these audiences as equal, think carefully about how you’ll approach them on Black Friday. While high-value customers may just need a simple discount message, ad engagers might require a little more convincing to make the leap and purchase a product.

You should also consider how to balance your marketing budget across these retargeting audiences.

When it comes to Black Friday, there’s no room for inefficient spending. Identify your ‘bullseye’ audiences of hot prospects and existing customers, and make sure you’re allocating enough budget to drive as many conversions as possible.

🎯 Need targeting help? Get the guide >> 10 Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies That Work In a Privacy-First World

3. Launch eye-catching creative assets

High-quality creative assets can be a powerful weapon during the pandemonium of Black Friday. Capturing the attention of your audience is half the battle.

To start with, make sure that both your products and Black Friday promotions are crystal clear in your ad visuals. Users are going to be scrolling through an ocean of generous discounts, so they need to understand your offering at a glance.

You can also look at previous competitor Black Friday campaigns in the Facebook Ad Library to gather valuable intel. How are they positioning their products and price promotions, and how can you differentiate your brand this year?

Whether it’s a static image or a video, make sure that your creative assets are designed to immediately grab attention. Motion and color can be super effective here, so don’t hesitate to think outside the box and separate yourself from other marketers.

Remember, the most successful Black Friday advertisers aren’t trying to create artistic masterpieces. They’re using high-quality product images and bold visuals to communicate their promotions and generate sales.

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4. Experiment with different ad formats to achieve superior performance

Black Friday is an unpredictable event for Facebook advertisers. What might work in your normal campaigns may not perform here, and vice versa.

To help you identify new creative opportunities and effective placements, make sure you’re experimenting with different ad formats across Black Friday.

Not only will a diverse combination of ad formats keep your creative messaging fresh, but it will also provide you with more opportunities to engage your audience and showcase your product promotions. By testing out new ideas and reacting quickly with optimizations, you’ll significantly increase your chances of driving sales.

For example, Facebook data shows that video assets are extremely popular during Black Friday, with 30% of mobile shoppers claiming that video is the best format for discovering new products.

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Advantage+ Carousel ads can also deliver outstanding results on Black Friday as they allow you to show off a range of tailored product recommendations to your audience.

Getting out of your comfort zone is very important during the Black Friday weekend, since many of the usual Facebook advertising rules change. If you typically only run one or two types of Facebook ads, push the boat out, and try something new–you might be surprised at the results.

⚡️ Get more helpful Facebook advertising data in our updated benchmarks!

5. Use action-driving, sales-led copywriting techniques

Since you’ll be facing intense competition during Black Friday, every element of your Facebook ads will need to be designed to drive clicks and conversions.

Your ad copy is one of the most important factors to consider here.

Creativity is important, but incentivizing action is even more important. Whenever you’re crafting ad copy for Black Friday activity, focus on communicating clear discounts and compelling product benefits–there’s no room for irrelevant information.

While functional ad copy may not be the most witty or imaginative, if it generates sales, it’s doing a good job.

Use your primary text to land your major selling points (i.e. 30% off this product collection) and then use additional copy to highlight added benefits such as free shipping or returns.

You should also look to employ sales-led copywriting techniques to make your ads as persuasive as possible. For instance, scarcity (i.e., only X products left) and urgency (i.e., sale ending in X hours) are powerful motivators for shoppers. You can also highlight big, simple percentages (e.g. 70% off normal prices) to make an immediate impact on consumers.

The more value your ad copy is communicating, the more likely customers are to convert.

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6. Don’t hesitate to scale up successful strategies

The Black Friday sale moves fast, and if you want to drive optimal results through Facebook ads, you need to be decisive.

By scaling up successful tactics and audiences, you can make the most of the sales period to maximize conversions. However, you won’t have the luxury of time–if you’re going to scale up budgets, you’ll need to scale them quickly and efficiently.

So how can you prepare for speedy and effective budget scaling during Black Friday?

To give yourself the biggest number of opportunities to scale, it’s a good idea to start your campaign with a diverse mix of broad audiences. While you’ll always want to allocate a healthy budget for your red-hot retargeting segments, you’ll also need to balance this out with larger audiences that will ensure sufficient scale.

Once you’ve identified creatives or audiences that are generating high volumes of conversions, you can begin to scale. This could be vertical scaling (i.e. increasing ad set budgets) or horizontal scaling (i.e. replicating/tweaking successful tactics).

It’s worth remembering that the Facebook ads landscape is highly contested during Black Friday, so you’re likely to pay more for impressions and conversions than usual. However, if you can scale up your campaigns effectively, your sales figures will compensate for it!

7. Optimize your ad delivery to stay competitive

Launching Facebook ads during Black Friday can be a frantic time, but to deliver the best possible returns for your business, it’s crucial to stay focused on ad delivery.

As mentioned, Black Friday is a unique event where you’ll be facing a ridiculous amount of marketing competition. Because of this, you may notice a couple of common issues with ad performance–restricted delivery and escalating campaign costs.

Fortunately, if you keep your eye on the ball, you can make a few key adjustments to overcome these obstacles and ensure consistent ad delivery.

The first thing you’ll want to do is accelerate Facebook ad delivery. When you accelerate delivery at the ad set level, you’ll allow the Facebook algorithm to invest your budget as quickly as possible, while still considering your bid cap.

This essentially means that Facebook will be delivering your ads as frequently as possible, which is perfect for a time-sensitive period like Black Friday.

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However, that doesn’t mean your investment will be wasted on ineffective tactics. By putting smart Automated Rules in place, you can set up triggers that will automatically pause underperforming ads and protect your budget.

For instance, you may want to implement a rule that instantly pauses ads generating low clicks or a poor ROAS. This allows you to maintain campaign effectiveness while still accelerating delivery for a limited time.

Since you’re likely to spend more during a Black Friday campaign, it’s also a good idea to adjust the spend limit on your Facebook Ads account. Advertising costs tend to increase rapidly over the Black Friday weekend, so if you want to avoid issues with ad delivery, you’ll want to give yourself a little more flexibility in terms of campaign spend.

8. Avoid making last-minute changes to your Facebook Ads campaign

Although Black Friday can be a chaotic time for Facebook advertisers, you need to avoid making last-minute tweaks and adjustments to your campaigns.

Why?

Because whenever you launch new Facebook ads, the algorithm automatically enters a Learning Phase.

During this time, the platform will serve your ads to different audience segments, gather performance insights, and make optimizations to improve performance. Results will often fluctuate during this initial learning period, but this is completely normal. While it might be tempting to intervene, you need to trust the algorithm and be patient.

The Learning Phase usually needs to complete around 50 conversion events before performance stabilizes, so if you start interfering with your campaign, this learning process will reset–and you’ll be back to square one.

(As you’ll already know, time is money during the Black Friday weekend, and any optimization delays can be very costly!)

To avoid the need for last-minute changes, make sure that you’ve triple-checked everything from your target audiences to your creative headlines. It’s fine to pause ineffective audiences and upweight high-performing tactics once you’ve gathered robust data, but don’t rush in to make tiny tweaks during the Learning Phase.

Create compelling ecommerce Black Friday Facebook ads

Black Friday may seem like an intimidating event for advertisers, but there’s no reason why you can’t profit massively from this e-commerce goldmine.

Though you’ll inevitably be facing a crazy level of competition, with the right Facebook ads strategies, you can cut through the noise to target and convert high-value audiences.

With high-impact ad creatives, data-fuelled optimizations, effective budget scaling, and laser-focused targeting tactics, you can embrace the chaos of Black Friday to drive exceptional results for your business.