BFCM Meta Ads Strategy: What Facebook Ads to Run Black Friday 2024

BFCM Meta Ads Strategy: What Facebook Ads to Run Black Friday 2024

BFCM Meta Ads Strategy: What Facebook Ads to Run Black Friday 2024

Oct 30, 2024

Introduction

We will be talking about Black Friday Cyber Monday Meta Ads Strategy. I’ve done a few episodes now in the last several weeks around my strategy for 2024 with Black Friday and Cyber Monday for my e-commerce brand, but I haven’t yet shared with you what I’m planning for my ad strategy on Meta for this critical time of year with shopping and sales online around the world, especially in Australia, where I advertise.

The Challenge of Predicting Performance

I want to talk to you today a bit about Meta in general, how it behaved last year, so 2023 with Black Friday for me in my e-commerce store, and what I’m thinking for this year. This is a bit of a tricky episode. It’s probably part data, part intuition, and strategy because it’s very hard to test this sort of thing in advance. Black Friday is an event, so you can try different promotions online with your Facebook ads and your e-commerce store, especially if you have a Shopify store. You can try different sales and promotions and see how that performs and how that lands, but no one really knows until Black Friday—when that week starts to happen in everyone’s diary—how Meta will actually perform.

No one knows how many advertisers will be on the platform, who will be competing for the same audience that you’ll be competing for as well. Although I’m going to give you some info on what happened for me with my Meta ads strategy in 2023, it probably bears little resemblance to what I’m thinking for this year because Meta changes all the time. If you advertise on the platform, you know that already. This year will not behave the same as last year. If it does, I’ll be really surprised; that would seem pretty out of character for Facebook and Instagram to behave the same way as a whole 12 months ago.

Strategy Changes for 2024

So let me share with you a little about my ideas for this year and what happened for me last year with Meta around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I hope this gives you a bit of context, maybe some encouragement to think about what your plans are for your own brand this year as far as paid ads go, and, of course, other strategies around Black Friday Cyber Monday as well. I encourage you to go back and listen to some of my other episodes if you haven’t yet started to think about this critical shopping period. Really encourage you to sit down and do some work on that in the next couple of days.

One thing that I’m definitely changing this year versus last year, and I don’t really love this change, but if I want to use Meta as one of my levers for driving revenue, I kind of don’t have much choice. I’m going to run my Black Friday sale for the entire week, from Monday the 25th of November all the way through to Cyber Monday, which is Monday the 2nd of December. My promotion this year for my e-commerce store will run a full seven days.

I actually don’t love that personally. I really like to keep my sale just for the weekend, which is traditionally Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And I’m probably alone in that because I know, and you probably do too, that many brands will start their Black Friday sales as soon as November 1st hits. Many will run it through the week, as I’m planning to do from Monday the 25th of November to the following Monday. The reason I’m making that change this year is purely because of Meta.

Changes in Meta Ads Performance

In the past 12 months, when you launch a campaign or start a campaign for Facebook and Instagram advertising, you can’t evaluate the campaign anymore and decide if it’s good or not good and kill it or scale it after three days. It used to be that after 72 hours, you could make a definitive decision about campaign performance. In 2020, you could decide that within 24 hours. That’s how much Meta has changed in the last four years.

In 2020, a campaign could run for 24 hours at most before you decided if it was worth continuing. Last year, typically I would leave a campaign to run for 72 hours before deciding if it was worth continuing. Now, at the end of 2024, a campaign really needs to sit, learn, and start to find its feet for almost a full seven days before deciding whether to continue it. That’s a long time if you’re looking to run a sale for Black Friday.

This year, I am reluctantly running my Black Friday sale for the whole week because I want to start a campaign, build it Monday night, make sure it’s running and active by Monday the 25th of November so that within a few days, as engagement with it will be high because it’s a sale, it will start finding its feet. Then, by day five through to seven, I hope to see it deliver results.

Conclusion

Keep that in mind for yourself; it’s not just me it affects—this is the new standard for Meta advertisers this year. That’s something that’s really different this year and has determined a different approach for me because I want to leverage Meta ads as one of my ways to drive revenue. The main ways will be organic social, Meta ads, and email. Email will be my main revenue driver, which is why I’m doing all these lead-generation activities now.

Introduction

We will be talking about Black Friday Cyber Monday Meta Ads Strategy. I’ve done a few episodes now in the last several weeks around my strategy for 2024 with Black Friday and Cyber Monday for my e-commerce brand, but I haven’t yet shared with you what I’m planning for my ad strategy on Meta for this critical time of year with shopping and sales online around the world, especially in Australia, where I advertise.

The Challenge of Predicting Performance

I want to talk to you today a bit about Meta in general, how it behaved last year, so 2023 with Black Friday for me in my e-commerce store, and what I’m thinking for this year. This is a bit of a tricky episode. It’s probably part data, part intuition, and strategy because it’s very hard to test this sort of thing in advance. Black Friday is an event, so you can try different promotions online with your Facebook ads and your e-commerce store, especially if you have a Shopify store. You can try different sales and promotions and see how that performs and how that lands, but no one really knows until Black Friday—when that week starts to happen in everyone’s diary—how Meta will actually perform.

No one knows how many advertisers will be on the platform, who will be competing for the same audience that you’ll be competing for as well. Although I’m going to give you some info on what happened for me with my Meta ads strategy in 2023, it probably bears little resemblance to what I’m thinking for this year because Meta changes all the time. If you advertise on the platform, you know that already. This year will not behave the same as last year. If it does, I’ll be really surprised; that would seem pretty out of character for Facebook and Instagram to behave the same way as a whole 12 months ago.

Strategy Changes for 2024

So let me share with you a little about my ideas for this year and what happened for me last year with Meta around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I hope this gives you a bit of context, maybe some encouragement to think about what your plans are for your own brand this year as far as paid ads go, and, of course, other strategies around Black Friday Cyber Monday as well. I encourage you to go back and listen to some of my other episodes if you haven’t yet started to think about this critical shopping period. Really encourage you to sit down and do some work on that in the next couple of days.

One thing that I’m definitely changing this year versus last year, and I don’t really love this change, but if I want to use Meta as one of my levers for driving revenue, I kind of don’t have much choice. I’m going to run my Black Friday sale for the entire week, from Monday the 25th of November all the way through to Cyber Monday, which is Monday the 2nd of December. My promotion this year for my e-commerce store will run a full seven days.

I actually don’t love that personally. I really like to keep my sale just for the weekend, which is traditionally Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And I’m probably alone in that because I know, and you probably do too, that many brands will start their Black Friday sales as soon as November 1st hits. Many will run it through the week, as I’m planning to do from Monday the 25th of November to the following Monday. The reason I’m making that change this year is purely because of Meta.

Changes in Meta Ads Performance

In the past 12 months, when you launch a campaign or start a campaign for Facebook and Instagram advertising, you can’t evaluate the campaign anymore and decide if it’s good or not good and kill it or scale it after three days. It used to be that after 72 hours, you could make a definitive decision about campaign performance. In 2020, you could decide that within 24 hours. That’s how much Meta has changed in the last four years.

In 2020, a campaign could run for 24 hours at most before you decided if it was worth continuing. Last year, typically I would leave a campaign to run for 72 hours before deciding if it was worth continuing. Now, at the end of 2024, a campaign really needs to sit, learn, and start to find its feet for almost a full seven days before deciding whether to continue it. That’s a long time if you’re looking to run a sale for Black Friday.

This year, I am reluctantly running my Black Friday sale for the whole week because I want to start a campaign, build it Monday night, make sure it’s running and active by Monday the 25th of November so that within a few days, as engagement with it will be high because it’s a sale, it will start finding its feet. Then, by day five through to seven, I hope to see it deliver results.

Conclusion

Keep that in mind for yourself; it’s not just me it affects—this is the new standard for Meta advertisers this year. That’s something that’s really different this year and has determined a different approach for me because I want to leverage Meta ads as one of my ways to drive revenue. The main ways will be organic social, Meta ads, and email. Email will be my main revenue driver, which is why I’m doing all these lead-generation activities now.

Introduction

We will be talking about Black Friday Cyber Monday Meta Ads Strategy. I’ve done a few episodes now in the last several weeks around my strategy for 2024 with Black Friday and Cyber Monday for my e-commerce brand, but I haven’t yet shared with you what I’m planning for my ad strategy on Meta for this critical time of year with shopping and sales online around the world, especially in Australia, where I advertise.

The Challenge of Predicting Performance

I want to talk to you today a bit about Meta in general, how it behaved last year, so 2023 with Black Friday for me in my e-commerce store, and what I’m thinking for this year. This is a bit of a tricky episode. It’s probably part data, part intuition, and strategy because it’s very hard to test this sort of thing in advance. Black Friday is an event, so you can try different promotions online with your Facebook ads and your e-commerce store, especially if you have a Shopify store. You can try different sales and promotions and see how that performs and how that lands, but no one really knows until Black Friday—when that week starts to happen in everyone’s diary—how Meta will actually perform.

No one knows how many advertisers will be on the platform, who will be competing for the same audience that you’ll be competing for as well. Although I’m going to give you some info on what happened for me with my Meta ads strategy in 2023, it probably bears little resemblance to what I’m thinking for this year because Meta changes all the time. If you advertise on the platform, you know that already. This year will not behave the same as last year. If it does, I’ll be really surprised; that would seem pretty out of character for Facebook and Instagram to behave the same way as a whole 12 months ago.

Strategy Changes for 2024

So let me share with you a little about my ideas for this year and what happened for me last year with Meta around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I hope this gives you a bit of context, maybe some encouragement to think about what your plans are for your own brand this year as far as paid ads go, and, of course, other strategies around Black Friday Cyber Monday as well. I encourage you to go back and listen to some of my other episodes if you haven’t yet started to think about this critical shopping period. Really encourage you to sit down and do some work on that in the next couple of days.

One thing that I’m definitely changing this year versus last year, and I don’t really love this change, but if I want to use Meta as one of my levers for driving revenue, I kind of don’t have much choice. I’m going to run my Black Friday sale for the entire week, from Monday the 25th of November all the way through to Cyber Monday, which is Monday the 2nd of December. My promotion this year for my e-commerce store will run a full seven days.

I actually don’t love that personally. I really like to keep my sale just for the weekend, which is traditionally Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And I’m probably alone in that because I know, and you probably do too, that many brands will start their Black Friday sales as soon as November 1st hits. Many will run it through the week, as I’m planning to do from Monday the 25th of November to the following Monday. The reason I’m making that change this year is purely because of Meta.

Changes in Meta Ads Performance

In the past 12 months, when you launch a campaign or start a campaign for Facebook and Instagram advertising, you can’t evaluate the campaign anymore and decide if it’s good or not good and kill it or scale it after three days. It used to be that after 72 hours, you could make a definitive decision about campaign performance. In 2020, you could decide that within 24 hours. That’s how much Meta has changed in the last four years.

In 2020, a campaign could run for 24 hours at most before you decided if it was worth continuing. Last year, typically I would leave a campaign to run for 72 hours before deciding if it was worth continuing. Now, at the end of 2024, a campaign really needs to sit, learn, and start to find its feet for almost a full seven days before deciding whether to continue it. That’s a long time if you’re looking to run a sale for Black Friday.

This year, I am reluctantly running my Black Friday sale for the whole week because I want to start a campaign, build it Monday night, make sure it’s running and active by Monday the 25th of November so that within a few days, as engagement with it will be high because it’s a sale, it will start finding its feet. Then, by day five through to seven, I hope to see it deliver results.

Conclusion

Keep that in mind for yourself; it’s not just me it affects—this is the new standard for Meta advertisers this year. That’s something that’s really different this year and has determined a different approach for me because I want to leverage Meta ads as one of my ways to drive revenue. The main ways will be organic social, Meta ads, and email. Email will be my main revenue driver, which is why I’m doing all these lead-generation activities now.