Looking for the hour-by-hour view of the event week itself? That lives in Black Friday Week on Amazon, Hour by Hour. This post is the countdown that gets you there. For the full plan on one page, see the Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon Ads Guide.
Our 14-Day Prime Day PPC Playbook has been the most-read seasonal post on this site, and the reason is simple: sellers wanted a calendar, not a philosophy. Black Friday and Cyber Monday deserve the same treatment, with one important difference. Prime Day is a 48-hour event. BFCM is five days of elevated demand bracketed by a week of warm-up traffic and a week of hangover. The countdown is the same length, but the event in the middle is wider, which changes how you stage it.
If you followed the BFCM prep checklist over the summer, most of the structural work is already done and this playbook is your execution calendar. If you did not, this is the minimum viable version. Here is the day-by-day.
Phase One: T-14 to T-8 (November 12 to 18)
| Window | Dates | Job |
|---|---|---|
| T-14 to T-8 | Nov 12 to 18 | Audit, inventory check, structure |
| T-7 to T-1 | Nov 19 to 25 | Stage budgets, rules, schedules, alerts |
| T-0 to T+4 | Nov 26 to 30 | Monitor. Act only on alerts. |
| Restore | Dec 1 to 7 | Restore baseline, harvest search terms, reset budgets |
T-0 is Thanksgiving, November 26. Black Friday is T+1, Cyber Monday is T+4. The restore starts December 1, the morning after Cyber Monday.
This is the week most sellers skip, and it is the week that decides whether the staging week goes smoothly.
T-14 (November 12): Write down the baseline
- Pull 30-day performance for every campaign that will run through the event. Record daily budget, ACoS, and spend pace per campaign.
- Pick your hero ASINs: the top 20 percent by revenue and margin. These get the aggressive treatment. Everything else runs at baseline.
- Snapshot every budget and bid you plan to change. On December 1 you will need to know what "normal" looked like, and the console does not remember for you.
T-13 to T-11 (November 13 to 15): Inventory and listings
- Confirm hero ASIN inventory can cover two to three times normal weekly velocity through December 7. An ASIN that goes out of stock on Black Friday afternoon wastes every dollar you spent warming it up.
- Check deal and coupon submissions are approved, not pending. A deal that fails review on Thanksgiving breaks the campaign economics you planned around.
- Verify Sponsored Brands creative is approved and not expiring inside the window.
T-10 to T-8 (November 16 to 18): Structure
- Duplicate your top five to ten hero campaigns into BFCM-labeled copies. These are the containers for aggressive bids and budgets, so your baseline campaigns stay clean for comparison and restore.
- Build the event negative list. BFCM search traffic is broad and gift-oriented. Pre-load negatives for the terms that drained budget last November.
- Pick 20 to 50 keywords you will bid up. Not everything. Concentration is what makes the budget stretch across five days instead of two.
Phase Two: T-7 to T-1 (November 19 to 25)
Staging week. Everything that fires during the event gets built now, tested, and left alone. The goal is that on Thanksgiving morning you have nothing to do except watch.
T-7 (November 19): Budget staging
- Decide total event spend as a multiple of your normal daily budget, shaped across the five days. A reasonable illustrative shape: Thanksgiving at 1.5x, Black Friday at 2x to 3x, Saturday and Sunday at 1.5x, Cyber Monday at 2x to 3x.
- Build the BFCM event rule with that shape so budgets step up and down on their own. The ramp, the hold, and the restore should all be in one rule, so the teardown is automatic.
- Raise or remove any account-level daily cap for November 26 to 30.
T-6 to T-5 (November 20 to 21): Bids
- Set event bid adjustments on your hero keywords: a step up for the event window with the cap you are willing to pay, and an automatic step back on December 1.
- Decide your top-of-search placement modifier now. It is the placement everyone fights over on Black Friday, and deciding on the day means deciding emotionally.
T-4 (November 22): Dayparting overrides
- Your normal overnight pause is wrong for this week. Thanksgiving evening and the early hours of Black Friday carry real purchase intent.
- Build the event-week schedule as an override on top of your baseline, not a replacement, so the baseline returns the moment the window closes. The full setup is in how to set up dayparting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
T-2 (November 24): Alerts, not pauses
- Set performance rules to alert during the event, not to act. Example: alert if a hero campaign's ACoS runs above 1.5x its baseline for the prior full day. Abnormal traffic produces false positives, and an automatic pause on Black Friday morning is the most expensive mistake on this list.
- Turn on spend alerts for pace: you want to know by 10am if a budget is going to exhaust by noon.
T-1 (November 25): Walkthrough
- Open every hero campaign and confirm the budget rule, bid adjustments, dayparting override, and alerts are attached and scheduled.
- Confirm BFCM campaigns are staged and will activate on schedule, not manually.
- Decide who is checking in and when. Then stop building. Changes made on Thanksgiving Eve are the ones you cannot test.
Stage it once. Let it run.
Off Hours event rules ramp budgets in, hold them through Cyber Monday, and restore your baseline on December 1 without a midnight login. 14 days free.
Start free trial →Phase Three: T-0 to T+4 (November 26 to 30)
If staging went well, the event is a monitoring job. The hour-by-hour post covers what each day looks like in detail. The short version for the playbook:
- Thanksgiving (T-0): Event rules fire at midnight. Check pace mid-morning and again in the evening. Traffic builds through the night into Black Friday. Do not touch bids.
- Black Friday (T+1): Check pace every two to three hours. The only intervention worth making is releasing more budget on a hero campaign that is converting under target and about to cap. Everything else waits.
- Saturday and Sunday (T+2, T+3): Demand softens but stays above normal. This is when a mistimed ACoS pause would fire if you had set one. Review Friday's search terms for obvious negatives and add them.
- Cyber Monday (T+4, November 30): Second peak, skewed later in the day than Black Friday. Same rules: watch pace, release budget on winners, leave the rest alone.
Resist the urge to optimize mid-event. Amazon's reporting lags by hours, so what looks like a problem at 2pm is often incomplete data. The work you did at T-2 (alerts with sensible thresholds) is what tells you when something is actually wrong.
Phase Four: The restore (December 1 to 7)
The restore is where sellers lose the margin they just earned. Elevated budgets that nobody reset keep spending into December at Black Friday levels against post-event conversion rates. The full diagnosis is in why Amazon budgets stay elevated after a sales event; here is the calendar version.
- December 1: Event rules restore baseline budgets and bids. Verify every hero campaign against the T-14 snapshot. Anything still elevated gets reset by hand today, not Friday.
- December 1 to 3: Pause or archive the BFCM-labeled duplicate campaigns. Leave them paused rather than deleted so you have last year's structure next November.
- December 2 to 5: Harvest. Pull search terms from November 26 to 30 and move converting terms into your baseline campaigns as exact match. Add the junk to negatives. This is the most durable gain from the whole event.
- December 5 to 7: Shift to the holiday shipping cutoff schedule. Demand does not go back to October levels; it goes to gift-deadline levels, which is a different shape. Amazon Ads and holiday shipping cutoffs covers it.
What this playbook assumes
It assumes you have event rules, bid adjustments, and dayparting overrides that can be scheduled in advance and that restore on their own. If you are running BFCM by hand, the countdown still holds, but every "fires at midnight" step becomes "you log in at midnight," and the restore week becomes a spreadsheet exercise. That is how budgets stay elevated into December. How event rules work explains the ramp, hold, and restore shape that makes the schedule above run without you.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start preparing Amazon ads for Black Friday 2026? Structural work (campaign setup, bidding calibration, listing readiness) should be done by mid-October. The execution countdown in this playbook starts November 12, two weeks before Black Friday, and covers the audit, staging, event, and restore phases.
How much should I increase my Amazon ad budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? There is no universal multiple. A common illustrative shape is 1.5x normal on Thanksgiving, 2x to 3x on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and 1.5x on the weekend between. Calibrate against your own prior-November data and your margin per ASIN, and build the shape into an event rule so it restores on its own.
Should I use automatic pause rules during BFCM? No. Set performance rules to alert during the event window rather than act. Abnormal traffic and Amazon's reporting lag make false positives likely, and an automatic pause on a hero campaign on Black Friday morning is very hard to recover from.
What should I do the day after Cyber Monday? Verify every budget and bid against the baseline you recorded at T-14, pause the BFCM duplicate campaigns, and start harvesting converting search terms into your core campaigns. Then shift to a holiday shipping cutoff schedule rather than returning to your October setup.
Is the BFCM playbook different from the Prime Day playbook? The countdown is the same length, but BFCM is a five-day event bracketed by a week of warm-up and a week of hangover, where Prime Day is 48 hours. That means budget shapes have to stretch across more days, dayparting overrides cover a longer window, and the restore phase matters more.
Off Hours runs this entire calendar from one place: event rules for the budget shape, bid adjustments for hero keywords, dayparting overrides for the week, and spend alerts underneath all of it. Build it in plain English, schedule it once, and spend Black Friday watching instead of clicking. Start a free 14-day trial.