Black Friday 2026: a Google Shopping plan for web shops

Black Friday 2026 is on Friday 27 November. Cyber Monday is Monday 30 November.

That sounds like plenty of time. It is not. Most of what decides your Black Friday on Google Shopping is settled in October, because the price rules, the feed and the bidding all look backwards.

The dates

Day	2026
Singles Day	Wednesday 11 November
Thanksgiving (US)	Thursday 26 November
Black Friday	Friday 27 November
Cyber Monday	Monday 30 November
Christmas Day	Friday 25 December

Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday of November by US law, Black Friday the day after, and Cyber Monday the Monday after that. In 2025 Black Friday was 28 November, so this year it is one day earlier.

When it gets busy, and when it gets expensive

Google wrote in 2024 that global searches for “black friday” had started climbing as early as October the year before.

Clicks get dearer as the weekend gets closer. In smec’s European data (more than 650 million euros of ad spend), Shopping cost per click sat at about 0.29 to 0.30 € through the third quarter of 2025 and jumped to roughly 0.34 € in November. Optmyzr, across 4,292 to 5,886 accounts a year from 2022 to 2024, measured cost per click 16 to 17% higher from the Wednesday before Black Friday to the Wednesday after Cyber Monday than in the week before, in accounts that did not use a seasonality adjustment.

A budget that stays the same buys fewer clicks in the week that matters most.

In several European markets, Black Friday stands out more from a normal Friday than it does in the US. Adyen compared its 2025 Black Friday volume, counted from Thursday noon to Saturday 9:00, with the average of the five Fridays before:

Market	Black Friday vs a normal Friday (Adyen, 2025)
Denmark	6.11x
Spain	4.47x
Norway	3.53x
Sweden	3.36x
US	2.80x

That is Adyen’s own volume, not the whole market. Still, seven of the ten markets Adyen listed were European.

The plan, week by week

When	What to do
Now to Friday 16 October	Decide the offer and which products it covers. Mark them with a custom label in the feed. Fix disapprovals.
Friday 16 to Friday 30 October	Set ROAS targets and the season’s budget plan (Google: 4 to 6 weeks before the peak season). Then leave targets and structure alone.
From Saturday 24 October	No price cuts on products you will discount on Black Friday. The EU 30-day clock is running.
Early November	Switch CSS if you are going to. Set shipping cut-off times and return policies in Merchant Center.
Wednesday 11 November	Singles Day. A price you run that day can become your Black Friday reference price.
By Friday 20 November	Submit Merchant Center promotions. Load sale prices with start and end times. Raise daily budgets to the planned level.
Monday 23 to Monday 30 November	Watch budgets, stock and disapprovals every day. Do not touch targets.
Tuesday 1 to Monday 7 December	Do not judge the weekend yet. End the sale prices. Return budgets to normal.
Mid December	Christmas delivery dates and the last day to order.

Prices: the EU rule that decides your October

In the EU, the old price next to a discount is not your list price. It is your lowest price in the last 30 days. Article 6a of Directive 98/6/EC, inserted by Directive (EU) 2019/2161 and applied since 28 May 2022:

“The prior price means the lowest price applied by the trader during a period of time not shorter than 30 days prior to the application of the price reduction.”

In 2024 the EU Court of Justice added that a percentage discount must be calculated from that prior price too (case C-330/23, Aldi Süd). Aldi had printed the 30-day price under the offer but worked out the percentage from a higher earlier price. Under the Court’s reading, that is not enough.

So a discount from late October onwards can become the price your Black Friday discount is measured against. A sale starting Friday 27 November looks back to 28 October. A Black Week sale from Monday 23 November looks back to 24 October.

Countries may set their own rules for perishable goods, new products and step-by-step discounts, and your consumer authority may limit how long a sale can run. Check before you print the banner.

Merchant Center: sale prices, badges and promotions

Sale price. Keep your normal price in price and put the Black Friday price in sale_price. Add sale_price_effective_date with a start and an end time.

Include the time zone. Without one, Google defaults to UTC. In November, midnight in Berlin is 23:00 UTC, so a sale entered without a time zone starts an hour late in Central Europe.

The sale badge shows your old price struck through. For the European countries Google documents (France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK), the base price must have been valid for 30 of the past 200 days, and the discount must be more than 5% and less than 90%. Even then, the badge may not show.

The price drop badge is separate. Google can show it when you cut a fairly stable price clearly below your average over the past 60 days.

That makes three reference prices: two badges and the law. Meeting Google’s badge rules does not mean you meet the law.

Promotions (codes, gifts, free shipping) need offers in certain countries. In Europe that is France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Sell only in Denmark, Sweden or Poland, and you use sale prices instead. Google recommends submitting at least 24 hours before the start. Policy review runs in weekday business hours, and the final check can take up to 24 hours from the start time. Thursday night for Friday morning is a gamble.

Automatic price updates can correct a price from your product page. Google warns that they may not work for prices that change more than once a day, and that the product can be disapproved instead. If you change prices mid-weekend, update the feed at the same moment. Our feed optimisation guide covers the rest.

Bidding: what to change, and what to leave alone

Change targets early or not at all. Google says to adjust budgets and ROAS targets 4 to 6 weeks before the peak season, and that a bid strategy typically needs one to two conversion cycles to calibrate after a change. Lower your target on 20 November, and it may still be learning on Black Friday. More in how target ROAS works on Shopping.

Seasonality adjustments are where the sources disagree. An adjustment tells Smart Bidding to expect a higher conversion rate for a few days.

Source	Position
Google, help page	Ideal for events of one to seven days. Only for “major changes to conversion rates, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events”
Google, holiday tips page	For short sales, use them “if you expect to see dramatic shifts in conversion rates”
Vimal Bharadwaj, Optmyzr, 5 November 2025	Use them to tell Smart Bidding about the lift
Frederick Vallaeys, Optmyzr, 19 November 2025	Do not. With adjustments, CPC rose 32 to 37% against 16 to 17% without, and ROAS fell 10 to 17% against minus 2% to plus 5.7%. Revenue grew faster with adjustments (50.5% against 25% in 2022), so they buy volume at the cost of ROAS
Andrew Lolk, SavvyRevenue, 2024	Enter the change you want in bids, not the change you expect in conversion rate. At most 4 to 7 days

Two writers at the same company gave opposite advice two weeks apart. Bharadwaj and Google describe what the tool is for. Vallaeys measured what happened, comparing accounts that chose adjustments with accounts that did not. That is not a controlled test, but it covers three years.

Our reading: Black Friday is not news to Smart Bidding. Vallaeys calls it one of the most predictable spikes in global commerce, and accounts without adjustments still saw conversion rates rise 7.5 to 17.5%. An adjustment is for a spike Google cannot know about, like your own flash sale.

If you use one anyway, remember Lolk’s example. A retailer entered last year’s conversion lift of 100% and ran through its Black Friday budget before 11 in the morning. Its cost per click had only needed to rise 25%.

Budgets that run out before the evening

Google lets most campaigns spend up to twice their average daily budget on one day, but never more than 30.4 times it in a month. Even that runs out.

In Europe the busiest online hours come late. Adyen’s 2025 peaks on Black Friday were 17:00 in Sweden, 18:00 in Poland and the UK, 19:00 in the Netherlands and Italy, and 21:00 in Germany. France peaked on Sunday at 20:00.

A budget that is gone by lunch misses the hours people actually buy.

Raise daily budgets before the week starts and check “limited by budget” every morning from Monday 23 November. Google suggests you consider removing budget caps during spikes. If your budget is your cash flow, set the ceiling you can afford and check it twice a day. Running both campaign types? Decide beforehand which products go where: see Performance Max vs Standard Shopping.

Stock, shipping and returns

Stock. Google says automatic updates are no replacement for regular feed updates, and that frequent changes belong in the Merchant API. A product that sells out on Saturday morning should show as out of stock on Saturday morning.

Cut-off times. Google builds the delivery date it shows from your cut-off, handling and transit times. Leave the cut-off blank, and it defaults to 8:00 Pacific time: 17:00 in Central Europe. Google also adds a day for public holidays, but in Europe only for France, Germany and the UK. Selling elsewhere, build your holidays into your handling times.

Returns. In the EU, an online buyer has 14 days to withdraw, counted from the day they receive the goods, and you must refund within 14 days of being told. If you do not inform the buyer of that right, the period is extended by 12 months.

Expect more refunds. Adyen reports a refund rate of 11.32% on online purchases from Black Friday 2024, against 8.33% across the year.

A longer Christmas return window is a commercial choice, not a legal minimum. Offer one, and add it as a return policy in Merchant Center: Google says an uploaded policy takes precedence over what it finds on your website.

After the weekend

Do not judge Black Friday on Monday morning. Google says conversion delay can make ROAS look lower than it is, because conversions are reported against the date of the ad, not the sale. Optmyzr waited more than a week before pulling its Black Friday data, and still said the numbers could rise.

If your tracking broke, use a data exclusion, not a seasonality adjustment. Google’s instructions: apply it as soon as possible, cover the affected click dates including the conversion delay, aim for at least 90% of the affected clicks, and do not remove it afterwards.

December is not over. In smec’s European data, median ROAS dropped to 4.5 in mid-October 2025, climbed through November and peaked at 7.0 in mid-December. Average order value hit its fourth-quarter low in November. The best median return came in mid-December, not in Black Friday week.

What changes for a small or mid-size European shop

Benchmarks are aggregates of many accounts, often larger than yours. Three things change when you are smaller.

• Your own last year beats any benchmark. Pull daily cost, clicks and orders for November and December 2025, and plan from that.
• Learning takes longer. Google names conversion volume and conversion cycle length as two of the three things that decide it. If customers take a week from click to order, one to two cycles is one to two weeks.
• Search terms get messy when everyone types “black friday” plus everything. Our guide to negative keywords on Shopping helps.

Where a CSS fits in

In 21 European countries, Shopping ads must be placed by a comparison shopping service (CSS). Google’s own is called Google Shopping, and Merchant Center shows which one you use under Settings, General, Account setup.

Under the heading “How do I know how much CSSs bid in the auction on my behalf?”, Google’s help page says:

“Google Shopping currently ensures profitability by deducting a fixed percentage margin from each merchant bid before entering it into the auction.”

Google does not publish the size. Around 20% is the industry estimate, and it fits our own experience, but Google does not confirm it. So a bid of 1.00 competes as roughly 0.80 through Google’s own CSS, and as 1.00 through a CSS that charges a fixed fee instead of a margin, like ours.

Because the margin is a percentage, it costs the most in the weeks when clicks cost the most.

• It covers Shopping inventory only. In Performance Max, that is the Shopping ads, not Search text, YouTube or Display.
• With automated bidding, the gain can show up as more clicks rather than a lower cost per click, so measure impression share, not only CPC.
• Leaving Google’s own CSS is usually live within 24 hours in our experience, though Google’s rules allow up to 14 days. Leaving another CSS can take the full 14 days, because the old CSS holds a grace period. Switch by early November if you want it in place for Black Friday.

We run an independent CSS: from 11.66 € a month per shop on the annual plan with the founders offer (140 € a year), otherwise 20 € a month. 60 days money back, no lock-in. We cannot promise what it saves you, because that depends on your auction. Here is how it works.

What this article cannot tell you

• What your clicks will cost. The figures above are medians and averages across many shops. Your category can sit far above or below them.
• Which markets are in the data. smec does not publish its countries, and Optmyzr does not publish the market mix of its accounts.
• Your national law. We quote the EU directive and the EU court. Each country has its own implementation and enforcement.
• A result. Nobody can honestly promise a percentage for Black Friday.

Frequently asked questions

When is Black Friday 2026?

Friday 27 November 2026. Cyber Monday is Monday 30 November, and US Thanksgiving is Thursday 26 November.

When should I start preparing Google Ads for Black Friday?

In October. Google recommends adjusting budgets and ROAS targets 4 to 6 weeks before the peak season. Counted back from Black Friday, that is 16 to 30 October.

Should I use a seasonality adjustment for Black Friday?

Probably not, in our reading. Google recommends them only for major changes in conversion rate, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events. In Optmyzr’s three-year study, accounts using adjustments grew revenue faster but paid more per click for a lower ROAS.

How early should I submit Merchant Center promotions?

At least 24 hours before the start, says Google, in weekday business hours. In Europe, promotions need offers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain or the UK.

What old price can I show on Black Friday in the EU?

The lowest price you applied in the 30 days before the reduction. Percentages must be calculated from it too.

Should I lower my target ROAS for Black Friday?

Only weeks before. After a change, Google says a strategy typically needs one to two conversion cycles to settle.