Black Friday and Cyber Monday are not normal days with bigger budgets. The auction dynamics are different. The shopper behavior is different. And the cost of getting your campaign structure wrong is an order of magnitude higher than on any other day of the year.
Most sellers know this in theory. Most sellers still prepare too late.
When to start (earlier than you think)
Serious preparation for Black Friday starts in October. Not because there is that much to build. There is not. But because the decisions you make in October are the ones that determine how Q4 goes, and making those decisions with two days of runway instead of three weeks leads to shortcuts that cost money.
What to do in October:
Pull your hourly performance data from last Black Friday and Cyber Monday if you have it. What hours converted best? What campaigns exhausted budget and at what time? Which products outperformed expectations and which underperformed? These patterns repeat.
If this is your first Q4 on Amazon, use your best recent performance week as a proxy. The peak pattern, morning surge, midday plateau, evening surge, is consistent enough across categories that your weekday evening conversion rates are a reasonable starting estimate for Black Friday evening conversion rates.
Budget: the number you will set is probably too low
Amazon runs out of ad inventory on Black Friday. Not in the sense that there are no placements. There are always placements. But competition intensifies, CPCs rise, and campaigns that are budgeted for a normal day exhaust their daily limits hours earlier than usual.
The standard advice is to increase budgets 50 to 100 percent for the event. That is a reasonable floor, not a ceiling. If your product is in a highly competitive category, electronics, home goods, kitchen, and you are not willing to spend significantly more on Black Friday than a typical day, you are going to be outbid by sellers who are.
Set your increased budget before the event, not on the morning of. Sellers who log in at 8am on Black Friday and try to increase budgets are already behind. Set a schedule-based budget rule that activates on November 28th and runs through November 30th. Then stop thinking about it.
Dayparting on the highest-traffic day of the year
Black Friday shopping starts early. Deal alert emails go out at midnight or just after. Early morning hours, 6am to 10am, see a surge of intentional buyers who have been planning their purchases and are ready to act.
Midday on Black Friday is competitive but can be less efficient than the morning peak. Late afternoon and evening see a second surge as buyers who have been browsing all day make final decisions.
For Cyber Monday, the pattern is similar but skews later in the day. More of the volume happens in the afternoon and evening because it is a weekday and buyers are at work in the morning.
Build your dayparting schedule for each event separately. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have different traffic shapes. Running the same schedule for both is leaving optimization on the table.
The campaigns to prioritize and the ones to pull back
Not everything should run at full intensity during Black Friday. Some campaigns should get more budget. Some should get less.
More budget: your best-performing Sponsored Products campaigns for your hero products. These are the products you have deal pricing on, the ones with your best reviews, the ones your data says convert at the highest rate. Black Friday is not the time to experiment with new campaigns or new targeting. Double down on what you know works.
Less budget or paused: campaigns for products that are not part of your Black Friday strategy. If a product is not on deal and is not competitively priced for the event, running ads for it on Black Friday means paying peak CPCs to drive traffic to a product with no particular reason to buy today. Pause those campaigns for the event window and reallocate the budget to your hero products.
Performance triggers for when things go wrong
Black Friday will not go exactly as planned. Campaigns will exhaust budget faster than expected. A competitor will slash their price and your conversion rate will fall. A product will sell out before noon.
Set performance rules before the event that handle these scenarios automatically rather than requiring you to catch them manually while also managing everything else happening that day:
A rule that pauses any campaign where ACoS exceeds your target by 20 points for more than two consecutive hours. A rule that pauses campaigns for any product that falls below 10 units of inventory. A rule that sends an alert when any campaign exhausts budget before 2pm so you can decide whether to increase it.
Performance and budget rules running automatically on Black Friday mean you are making strategic decisions, not firefighting mechanical ones. That is the difference between a well-run event and a chaotic one.
The Cyber Monday trap
Sellers who run Black Friday well often coast into Cyber Monday. The event is right there, two days later, and it is tempting to leave the Black Friday setup running.
Do not do this without checking. Cyber Monday buyers are not the same as Black Friday buyers. Cyber Monday historically skews toward electronics, software, and subscription products. The "tech deals" framing. If your product is not a natural Cyber Monday purchase, running at Black Friday intensity on Cyber Monday means high CPCs for lower conversion rates.
Review your Cyber Monday performance separately from Black Friday. If last year's Cyber Monday showed strong conversion for your category, build a dedicated setup for it. If Cyber Monday was mediocre, budget accordingly. Run lighter than Black Friday and reallocate toward the days that actually performed.
The one thing most sellers do not do
They do not analyze last year's event before building this year's strategy.
Every decision in this post should be informed by your own data, not general advice about what Black Friday looks like. Your category, your products, your customers, and your pricing strategy all affect what the optimal setup looks like for your account.
Pull last year's hourly campaign data before you build anything. Look at where budget exhausted, where conversion rates peaked, which campaigns delivered the best ACoS. That data is the foundation of this year's setup. Everything else is generic.
Agencies running multiple client accounts through Q4 do this analysis for every account in October, then build account-specific event rules that activate automatically when the dates arrive. It is a few hours of work per account that removes the need to manually manage campaigns during the highest-stakes days of the year.
Off Hours lets you set event-specific campaign schedules and budget rules that activate automatically on the dates you define. Start a 14-day free trial and have your Q4 setup ready before the window opens.