What Founders Should Watch in Their Meta and Google Ads Over Black Friday
If you’re an e-commerce Founder Black Friday / Cyber Monday is probably the period your ad account is under the most pressure all year. It's also when you're most likely to watch the headline numbers and skip the ones underneath. Budgets go up, CPMs go up, and between stock, site and customer service there's little time to dig past "revenue looks good today".
You don't need to be an ads specialist or heavily into the platform numbers to tell whether things are on track. Most of the checks below cover Meta and Google together; two are platform-specific, so skip anything which doesn't apply to your business. Running through these checks takes no more than 15 minutes a day and needs nothing more than Ads Manager, Google Ads and your Shopify dashboard. None of them are about catching anyone out, they're about knowing where to look in order to understand what's happening in your account, so the conversation with whoever runs it can be a productive one.
SEVEN THINGS TO CHECK
1. IS SPEND GOING WHERE THE SALES ARE?
Sort your campaigns by spend, then by revenue. The top of both lists should look roughly the same. While you're there, look at the status column in Google Ads. A campaign marked "Limited by budget" is turning away searches it could have won, and on peak days, with search volume up, that can mean lost sales on a campaign that's working.
Ask: "Which campaigns are we scaling for the peak days, and are any being held back by budget?"
2. WHAT DOES YOUR OWN REVENUE SAY?
Take total store revenue for the day and divide it by total ad spend across every platform. That's your blended return, usually referred to as MER. These are your true metrics that no ad platform can inflate, because they come from your till, not their dashboard. If Meta and Google both report a great day but your blended return falls, the platforms are likely both claiming the same sales.
Ask: "What blended return are we aiming for over BFCM, and what would make us pull back?"
3. CHECK HOW YOUR META NUMBERS ARE BEING COUNTED
Meta changed how it counts sales from ads in March. A "click" now means a link click only. Sales that follow a like, save or share now sit in a separate "engage-through" column with a one-day window, rather than a seven-day click window. For most accounts the difference is small, but retargeting campaigns can report fewer sales than last year with no change in what they actually sell. Separately, since January, dashboards that pull data from Meta can no longer show 7- or 28-day view figures, so reports built on those will show lower numbers. Compare your store revenue year on year, not the dashboard. Also check that any new BFCM campaigns use the same attribution setting as your existing ones, otherwise you're adding up results counted in different ways.
Ask: "Which attribution setting are we reporting on, and how are we comparing to last year?"
4. ARE YOUR ORDERS AND YOUR AD PLATFORMS STILL IN STEP?
Each morning, put three numbers side by side: orders in your store, purchases in Meta, conversions in Google. They'll never match exactly, and that's fine. What matters is the gap staying roughly the same. A sudden widening usually means tracking has broken. That's often because of something added in the run-up to BFCM, such as a discount app, a sale landing page or a pop-up. Sometimes it's nothing anyone did at all, like an app update or an integration that's disconnected. Meta's Events Manager will also flag problems in its diagnostics tab.
This matters for more than just reporting. Meta and Google use your sales data to decide who to show your ads to next. If tracking breaks, they lose that signal and start optimising on incomplete information, in the period when you're spending the most.
Ask: "How would we know within a day if tracking has broken?"
5. CAN YOU SEE WHAT YOUR BRAND SEARCHES ARE DOING (GOOGLE ONLY)
Brand searches spike over BFCM because people come looking for you. Showing up for your own name is usually worth it, because those sales are cheap, and competitors may be bidding on it. What matters is where that traffic goes. Performance Max campaigns can pick up brand searches and mix those cheap sales into their results, which makes the rest of the campaign look stronger than it is. Open the Performance Max search terms report and see if your brand name sits near the top. If it does, it may be worth running brand in its own Search campaign, where you can see it on its own.
Ask: "Are brand searches in their own campaign, and how is Performance Max doing without them?"
6. WHO’S READING THE COMMENTS ON YOUR ADS?
Your BFCM ads reach more people than at any other time of year, and so do the comments under them. Questions about delivery dates, stock and whether the offer is genuine all sit in public, under ads you're paying to show. An unanswered complaint could be seen by everyone who sees the ad. Agree before the peak who checks them, how often, and what gets replied to, hidden or passed on, but if volume’s high there’s no harm in having an extra quick sweep each day.
One for afterwards, the questions people asked are some of the best material for future ads.
Ask: "Who's checking comments on our ads over BFCM, how often, and what’s the strategy on responding to negativity?"
7. ARE YOU FINDING NEW CUSTOMERS, OR DISCOUNTING EXISTING ONES?
BFCM will inevitably pull in your existing customers who were likely to buy at some point anyway. Showing them ads isn't necessarily wrong in itself, but the problem arises when it happens by default, and paid ads take credit for sales your email list could have brought in for almost nothing.
It's also easy to miss. Meta's Advantage+ campaigns can drift towards existing customers, because they're usually the cheapest people to convert. Meta removed the old setting that capped spend on them in early 2025. The newer Advantage+ sales campaigns let you split new and existing customers into separate ad sets, cap one and exclude existing customers from the other, but someone has to set that up deliberately. On Google, Performance Max and Search campaigns have a new customer acquisition goal that can bid more for new customers, or only for them.
What to check:
Your own numbers. In your store's reports, what share of BFCM orders came from first-time customers? Compare it with a normal month.
Your customer list. Is it connected to Meta and Google and kept up to date? Exclusions only work if the platforms know who your customers are.
Where existing customers are reached. Email and SMS cost almost nothing to send. If paid ads are doing most of the work of reaching people already on your list, that's budget that could be finding new ones.
Ask: "How much of our ad spend is going on existing customers, and is that a choice or a default?"
TWO THINGS TO BEAR IN MIND OVER THE PEAK PERIOD
Don't judge on one morning's numbers. Ad platforms credit sales to the day someone clicked or saw the ad, so the last day or two keep filling in as later sales arrive. Yesterday usually looks worse than it will end up. Your store's own sales are live, so check those first.
Expect some changes to be rapid and others to have to wait. Over a peak this short, sitting on what's clearly working or clearly broken costs more than it saves. Shifting budget towards winners, pausing ads for products that have sold out and fixing broken tracking should all happen on the same day. Rebuilding campaigns, changing what they optimise for or replacing all the creative is riskier, because it can stall campaign performance when you can least afford it. If a change sounds big, ask what it's expected to do and how you'll know if it worked.
ONE QUESTION…
What's the one thing you're least sure about in your ad account going into BFCM? Use the button below and let us know. We read every reply, and if it's something we can answer in a couple of lines, we will.
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