If you think there is still time to start preparing, think again. Black Friday preparation starts now — not in the week before the peak. This post lays out the practical checklist we walk every client account through in the eight weeks leading up to Black Friday 2025, covering the six areas where gaps show up as lost revenue on the day.
The 6-point Black Friday checklist
1. Offers and revenue plan. Define the offers explicitly, by category, and model what each is expected to contribute to the revenue target. "We will have discounts" is not a plan — which categories lead, which protect margin, and which drive the peak hours is the plan.
2. Inventory coordination and team alignment. Black Friday demand outstrips forecast most years; make sure inventory planning and the operations team are tied into the same numbers your marketing team is selling against. Nothing erodes brand trust faster than a sold-out SKU in a paid ad.
3. Creatives and ad assets ready early. Produce, review, and approve ad creative at least two weeks before the peak. Scrambling to finalise creative in BF week itself is how campaigns launch with weak assets, burn budget in the first 48 hours, and are unrecoverable by the weekend.
4. Site, tracking pixels, and conversion events. Test everything — desktop, mobile, every checkout variant — weeks before the peak. Verify tracking pixels fire correctly, verify conversion events reach Google Ads and Meta properly, verify server-side GTM paths are clean. Lost tracking in BF week is lost attribution that costs you your post-peak learnings too.
5. SEO content with Black Friday keywords. Organic traffic during BF is material revenue. Publish BF-themed content (buyer guides, category round-ups, gift inspiration) weeks before the peak so it can index and start ranking. Waiting until BF week to publish is too late.
6. PPC campaigns across Google, Meta, and TikTok. Remarketing audiences warmed up, Smart Bidding re-tuned against the BF target, budget plans set across each platform, remarketing segments timed to the user journey. TikTok specifically benefits from earlier upper-funnel warm-up than Google.