The Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon Ads Guide.

What this guide covers, and what it does not.

This guide is about the advertising side of Black Friday and Cyber Monday on Amazon: how to shape your budgets across the five days, when to stage campaigns and rules, how your dayparting schedule needs to change for the week, what to watch while it runs, and how to unwind it all without leaving December budgets at event levels.

It does not cover deal submission, pricing, or inventory planning in depth. Those affect advertising and we note where, but the guide stays in the advertising lane: bids, budgets, schedules, and timing.

It is also the hub for everything we have written on the event. Each chapter summarizes one part of the plan and links to the post that goes deeper, so you can read this end to end once and then work from the detailed posts during setup.

A note on data: the market figures in this guide come from Adobe Analytics' 2025 holiday reporting on US online spending, Tinuiti's 2025 Black Friday and Cyber Monday recap of Amazon advertiser data, and the 2025 Cyber Benchmark Report from Pacvue and Helium 10. Sources are cited where each figure appears. Budget multipliers and schedules in this guide are illustrative planning starting points, not benchmarks, and you should calibrate them against your own account history.

It is a five-day event, not a Friday.

The name suggests two days. The spending says five. In 2025, US shoppers spent $6.4 billion online on Thanksgiving, $11.8 billion on Black Friday, another $11.8 billion across Saturday and Sunday combined, and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, according to Adobe. Cyber Monday was the largest single day, and the weekend between the two peaks carried as much spending as Black Friday itself.

Amazon advertising data points the same way. Tinuiti's recap of 2025 found that Sponsored Products attributed sales grew more than 30% year over year from Saturday through Monday, and that the strongest growth moved away from the week before Thanksgiving (where it sat in 2024) toward the weekend and Cyber Monday. The shoulder days are no longer an afterthought.

Volume and efficiency are not the same thing, though. The 2025 Cyber Benchmark Report from Pacvue and Helium 10 found that brands saw stronger return on ad spend on Black Friday than on Cyber Monday, a pattern that held in both the US and the EU. Cyber Monday brings the most dollars; Black Friday tended to bring them more cheaply.

Four phases. Each with a different job.

BFCM advertising runs in four phases. Most of the money is made in the third, but most of the outcome is decided in the first two, and most of the money that gets wasted is wasted in the fourth.

Stage everything. Then stop touching it.

The goal of the countdown is simple: on Thanksgiving morning, you should have nothing left to build. Every budget change, bid change, and schedule change for the week exists as a scheduled rule with a start, an end, and a restore. Here is the sequence.

If you are reading this in November and have not done the foundation work, the countdown still holds. It just carries more risk, because you are going into the event with less keyword history and less room to correct. The Cyber Monday setup checklist is the shortest version of this list if you are short on time.

How much should you budget, and how should it be shaped?

There is no universal multiplier. The right number depends on your category's competition, your margins, and what last November looked like in your own account. What we can say with confidence is that the shape matters as much as the total: a single flat budget across five days will be too low on the peaks and too high on the shoulders.

A reasonable illustrative starting shape uses two multipliers: a higher one for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and a lower one for Thanksgiving and the weekend. The planner below turns your normal daily spend into a day-by-day budget using those two numbers. Treat its defaults as a place to start, then adjust against your own prior-year data.

Two rules of thumb make the planner more useful. First, raising budgets matters more than raising bids. A campaign that runs out of budget at 11am on Black Friday is invisible for the rest of the day no matter how high its bids were. Second, build the shape into a rule, not a calendar reminder, so the step down on Saturday and the step back up on Monday happen on time, and the restore happens on December 1 without you. The longer version, including how to split budgets between the Cyber Five and the rest of December, is in Amazon Holiday Ad Budgets: How Much and When.

Your normal schedule is wrong for these five days.

Most dayparting schedules throttle or pause overnight because late hours convert poorly in a normal week. During the Cyber Five, that assumption breaks in three places: deals often launch at midnight, Thanksgiving evening carries real purchase intent, and the most valuable window of the whole week is late. Adobe recorded Cyber Monday 2025's peak spending between 8pm and 10pm, at $16 million per minute.

Mobile matters here too. Adobe found that 61.6% of Thanksgiving 2025 online spending and 57.5% of Cyber Monday spending happened on phones. Evening and couch-shopping hours are mobile hours, which is one more reason the late-evening window deserves budget.

The single most important principle: build the week as an override, not an edit. Leave your baseline schedule alone, layer a dated event schedule on top of it, and let it expire. Editing the baseline by hand is how overnight pauses stay off until January. The full six-step setup, including time zones and scoping the override to hero campaigns only, is in How to Set Up Amazon Ads Dayparting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Monitor. Release budget on winners. Leave the rest alone.

If the countdown went well, the event itself is a monitoring job. The actions available to you are deliberately narrow, and that is the point.

What to do

Watch pace, not ACoS. The question that matters on the two peak days is whether each hero campaign's budget will last into the evening. If a campaign is converting under target and on track to cap by early afternoon, release more budget. That is the single highest-value intervention of the week.

Harvest negatives over the weekend. Black Friday's search term data is the first clean read on what the event traffic looks like. Saturday is a good time to add obvious negatives before Cyber Monday spends against the same junk terms.

Let alerts tell you when something is wrong. Spend alerts for pace and performance alerts for ACoS, set during the countdown with sensible thresholds, are what separate a real problem from a reporting lag.

What not to do

Do not let automatic pause rules run during the event. Abnormal traffic produces false positives, and Amazon's reporting lags by hours, so what looks like a problem at 2pm is often incomplete data. An automatic pause on a hero campaign on Black Friday morning is one of the most expensive mistakes on this list. Convert pause rules to alerts for the week.

Do not restructure. New campaigns, new match types, and new ad groups mid-event introduce processing delays and reset the pacing you planned. Budgets and the occasional bid are the only levers worth pulling.

December 1 is where sellers give back their margin.

Unlike Prime Day, BFCM does not end into a quiet week. It ends into the gift season. That makes the restore trickier: you do not want to drop back to October levels, but you absolutely do not want to keep running at Cyber Monday levels against post-event conversion rates. Elevated budgets that nobody reset are the most common way the event's gains quietly disappear in December.

Exclude the Cyber Five from your baselines. When you review December and January performance, leave November 26 to 30 out of your comparison period. Event-week numbers will distort every ACoS and conversion decision you make for the next month. When January arrives, Post-Holiday Amazon Ads: What to Do in January covers the reset into the new year.

The six ways sellers lose BFCM on the advertising side.

What you should decide, and what should run on its own.

BFCM is five days long, starts at midnight on a holiday, and ends into a restore that has to happen on a specific morning. That combination is exactly where manual execution breaks down: not because the decisions are hard, but because they have to happen at the right minute, across every campaign, while you are at a Thanksgiving table.

What requires your judgment

Which ASINs are heroes. What the budget shape should be. Which keywords deserve elevated bids, and what you are willing to pay for top of search. When to release more budget on a winner mid-event. These depend on your margins, inventory, and competition, and they belong to you.

What should be automated

When budgets step up and down. When the overnight schedule lifts and when it returns. When bids rise for the event and when they come back. Whether everything returns to baseline on December 1. These are execution decisions with a known time and a known value, which is exactly what rules handle better than people. How Amazon event rules work explains the ramp, hold, and restore shape that makes the whole plan above run on its own.

Frequently asked questions.

Sources: Adobe, Cyber Monday 2025 online spending · Tinuiti, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 recap · Pacvue and Helium 10, 2025 Cyber Benchmark Report