Are you ready to skyrocket your sales and leave the competition in the dust this Black Friday / Cyber Monday frenzy? The holiday shopping season is just around the corner, and it’s the perfect time to capitalize on the shopping frenzy that sweeps the nation. But, success in advertising during these high-stakes shopping events doesn’t come easy.
So fasten your seatbelt and get ready to unlock the golden tips to advertising success during the most lucrative shopping days of the year.
TL;DR
- BFCM is the biggest traffic and conversion opportunity of the year for affiliates and advertisers alike, but ad costs (CPC/CPM) rise sharply during the peak window, so efficiency planning matters more than raw spend.
- Start building campaigns 2-3 weeks before Black Friday; the “Black Friday weekend” has effectively expanded into a multi-week “Cyber Week” / “Cyber Month” pattern.
- Highest-ROI verticals historically include electronics, fashion, beauty, home goods, subscriptions, finance, dating, betting/iGaming, and sweepstakes: see the vertical breakdown below for why each performs.
- Mobile is the dominant device for BFCM browsing and purchasing; campaigns and landing pages should be mobile-first, not mobile-adapted.
- Match traffic type (push, banner, popunder, native) to the offer and vertical: see the ad-format section for what tends to work where.
What Is the Black Friday / Cyber Monday Shopping Event?
Black Friday falls on the day after Thanksgiving in the United States (the fourth Thursday of November), so its calendar date shifts every year, always check the current year’s date rather than relying on a fixed number.
Cyber Monday follows on the next Monday. Together, BFCM marks the traditional start of the year-end holiday shopping season, historically built around in-store doorbusters and now dominated by online deals.
Several other markets run parallel or adjacent shopping events, which matters for GEO targeting decisions:
- Singles’ Day (China, Nov 11) – one of the largest single shopping days globally.
- El Buen Fin (Mexico, mid-November) – a nationwide sale tied to Revolution Day.
- White Friday (Middle East, late November) – regional Black Friday equivalent, driven by platforms like Noon and Amazon.ae.
- Diwali sales (India, Oct–Nov) – timing varies with the lunar calendar, but many retailers extend deep discounts into early November.
- European BFCM (late November) – widely adopted across Germany, France, Spain, and other EU markets.
- Boxing Day (Canada, Dec 26) – historically Canada’s largest retail sale day.
- Fukubukuro / Year-End Sales (Japan) – pre–New Year discounting bundled with “lucky bags.”
- Click Frenzy (Australia) – an online mega-sale modeled on BFCM.
The term “Cyber Monday” was coined in the early 2000s as a marketing strategy to encourage online shopping.
If you’re running multi-GEO campaigns, treat these as distinct events with distinct creative and timing needs, not a single global “Black Friday” push.
Why This Matters for Affiliates and Advertisers
So Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are huge sales events with the potential to boost revenue, attract new customers, and solidify brand loyalty. This shopping frenzy is a great opportunity for advertisers and affiliates to increase their revenue.
There’s a huge interest in this seasonal sales period, from people from all over the world, since the American phenomenon has surpassed its borders.
-> Shoppers eagerly anticipate Black Friday because they expect to find substantial discounts and exclusive promotions. This anticipation can result in high levels of engagement and purchasing, making it a prime time for businesses to attract customers.
-> By participating in these promotions, businesses can gain a competitive edge over their rivals since customers are more likely to prioritize Black Friday deals.
-> The data generated during Black Friday sales can provide valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and shopping patterns. This data can inform future marketing and sales strategies.
Black Friday Advertising Preparation Checklist
Since people are aware and enthusiastic about the incoming sales events, brands and affiliate marketers should start preparing deals that will appeal the most to what people want. That being said, the key is to find hot offers and promote them with traffic types that best match their audience!
Here’s a bit of know-how about planning a Black Friday advertising strategy to make you shine among your competitors.
- Lock your offers early. Confirm payouts, caps, and GEO availability with your network or advertiser partners before the season ramps up – capacity and payouts often shift as the date approaches.
- Build creative variants, not one ad. Plan for multiple creatives per offer so you can test into the format that performs (see Testing, below).
- Set a budget pacing plan, not just a total budget – peak-hour bidding behaves differently than off-peak.
- Prepare landing pages/pre-landers with a Black Friday theme (countdown timers, “up to X% off” framing, urgency language) rather than reusing evergreen creative.
- Decide your tracking and attribution setup in advance – BFCM is the worst time to be debugging postback URLs.
Top-Performing Verticals for Black Friday
These categories thrive during Black Friday due to their alignment with consumer expectations for discounts, gift potential, and practical value. Their broad appeal, combined with targeted marketing tactics and strategic promotions, provides affiliates with an excellent opportunity to drive significant traffic and optimize their ROI.
Electronics, gadgets, and tech
Higher price points typically mean higher affiliate commissions, and BFCM discounting makes big-ticket electronics accessible to a wider buyer pool, driving both volume and order value.
Fashion and apparel
Black Friday falls just before the holiday season(winter, Xmas), making it an attractive time for consumers to buy gifts or update their wardrobes. Affiliate offers on clothing, shoes, and accessories are particularly appealing as people look for deals on fashion essentials and statement pieces.
Beauty and personal care products
Beauty products often lead to repeat customers, which means potential long-term benefits if the affiliate partnership includes recurring commission structures.
Home goods and appliances
Black Friday deals on newer, innovative home appliances encourage shoppers to upgrade from older models, providing affiliates an opportunity to promote products with compelling before-and-after benefits.
Subscriptions and digital services
Cloud storage, fitness apps, streaming, and e-book subscriptions offer flexibility to target niche audiences with narrower, higher-intent creative.
Finance, dating, betting/iGaming, and sweepstakes
These verticals are not tied to physical inventory and typically scale well on push, popunder, and native traffic(see the ad-format section below.)
Creative and Copy Tactics That Hold Up
Deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday should be designed to attract and engage customers, but more importantly, create a sense of urgency and drive sales. To do so, take note of the following tactics used in the past.
- Use bold, high-contrast visuals: Black, white, and red remain the dominant BFCM palette because they read as “sale” instantly, but don’t treat this as mandatory; test against your vertical’s normal creative language.
- Use direct, action-oriented CTAs: “Shop Now,” “Grab Your Deal,” “Claim Your Spot.” BFCM creative should shorten the path to click, not warm up a cold audience.
- Include social proof: ratings, testimonials, before/after; shoppers are deal-saturated and looking for reassurance they’re not making a mistake.
- Lean into real urgency, not fake urgency: “Ends tonight” and “Only 24 hours” work when true; countdown timers that reset or don’t match the actual offer window erode trust and increase complaint/refund rates.
- Show real numbers over vague claims: “Save up to 45%” consistently outperforms “Huge discount”; specificity reads as credible.
- Promote exclusives, bundles, limited edition offers: Introduce exclusive or limited-edition products that are only available for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. This also creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency.
- Test multiple CTAs: Small wording changes can meaningfully shift CTR when competing against a flooded feed; treat this as a standing test, not a one-time decision.
Black Friday Advertising is About Timing: When To Start
Black Friday is no longer a single day, it’s a multi-week window.
Based on observed advertiser behavior in recent cycles, most major campaigns now:
- Launch teaser/awareness campaigns 2–3 weeks out to build retargeting pools and capture early intent signals.
- Increase budget pacing in the week immediately before Black Friday (“Cyber Week”), when competition and conversion volume both spike.
- Keep campaigns live through Cyber Monday and into the following week, targeting shoppers who deliberately waited for deeper last-minute discounts.
Around 43% of brands ran Black Friday-specific deals or messaging, and a big chunk of sales came from first-time buyers.
Research.Montain.com
A meaningful share of BFCM shoppers begin purchasing in the very early hours of the sale day, thus, plan launch timing and budget caps accordingly rather than assuming a standard business-hours ramp.
Audience Behavior During BFCM
BFCM shopping behavior differs from a normal month in a few consistent ways:
- Early shoppers vs. impulse buyers. A meaningful share of shoppers start browsing well before the event; a separate segment buys on impulse when a deal feels too good to pass up. Plan creative for both evergreen “planning” content for early browsers, urgency-driven creative for late-window impulse traffic.
- Online spending dominates. Most BFCM growth is now online rather than in-store, and shoppers report feeling they get better discounts online, reinforcing digital as the primary battleground.
- Mobile is the default device. Shoppers browse, compare, and buy from their phones throughout the day, not just during commute windows, mobile-first landing pages are not optional for this period.
Consumers find shopping via an app on their mobile device (42%) more appealing than filtering products on a website (37%).
Tidio
Ad Formats: What Tends to Work for BFCM
Don’t forget to take everything with a grain of salt. These are just our observations based on our decades of industry experience but you should use them as guidelines. The advertising industry is very dynamic, and great opportunities may arise from your own findings/combinations.
Push Advertising
Whether you go for the classic or the in-page push format, these ads work so well since they do not take space on a website and when they appear, you just can’t miss them.
During this shopping frenzy, they can be your advantage to reach and engage your ideal customers, especially if you create catchy Black Friday-themed creatives and choose the right timing.
As we noticed, utilities(app installs), dating and finance campaigns are very popular Black Friday advertising campaigns.
Banner Advertising
Since this is the period for exclusive promotions, price drops, and special bundles(you get the gist), you’ll want to catch your clients’ attention in the best way possible. And what screams advertisement, if not banner ads? They’re big, bright and so in your face that you can’t miss them.
Come check our pre-set sizes/placements as well as our inventory, then get to work. Nutra and e-commerce offers should work really well this time of the year.
Popunder Advertising
And last but not least, you’ll never go wrong with the good old popunders. The non-invasive, full-page message will always get a reaction from its viewers, especially if you include some catchy, entertaining elements and a bomb offer.
Sweepstakes and Betting ads work even better for Black Friday Advertising since people are already looking for a good deal and they are more prone to winning goodies.
Black Friday Advertising Tips from Mondiad
1. Start Early, End Late
Keep ads live through Cyber Monday and even the week after, targeting late buyers who waited for deeper discounts.
2. Testing and Optimization
Launch teaser campaigns early in November to capture intent data and build retargeting audiences.
Gradually increase your bids or budget pacing from the week before Black Friday (“Cyber Week” is the real goldmine).
- Don’t run one ad and call it done. BFCM is the highest-volume advertising period of the year, use it to run genuinely parallel creative, format, and channel tests rather than a single “hero” campaign.
- Use automated bidding tools where available (e.g., target-CPA style bidding) to protect ROI as auction competition and CPCs rise through the peak window.
- Track and review results in-cycle, not just after. If you have historical BFCM data, use it to pre-allocate budget to known winners. If this is your first cycle, build the habit of a structured post-mortem (which creatives, GEOs, and formats outperformed) so next year’s plan starts from data instead of guesswork.
3. Budget and Pacing
- Use automated rules or bid caps to prevent runaway CPCs during peak-competition hours.
- Increase budgets 48 hours before Black Friday to win early traffic before auction competition peaks.
- Allocate 25-30% of total spend for post-Black Friday remarketing; these users convert at lower costs.
- Run TargetCPA campaigns as they perform better when trained with event data ahead of time.
4. Audience Segmentation
A large share of BFCM buyers are new customers, which makes acquisition the primary opportunity — but don’t ignore existing customers:
- For returning customers: loyalty incentives, early access windows, or exclusive bundles.
- For new customers: first-purchase bonuses, free shipping, or starter bundles that lower the risk of trying an unfamiliar brand.
5. Recycle What Worked
The week after Black Friday is one of the most useful data windows of the year:
- Identify your top-performing creatives and placements and adapt them for Christmas/New Year campaigns rather than starting from scratch.
- Segment your BFCM audiences (buyers, abandoners, clickers) for post-season remarketing.
- Evaluate ROAS by traffic source and reallocate budget toward the formats and channels that actually converted, not just the ones that got the most volume.
Black Friday Advertising Trends
1. Record Spending and Smarter Advertising
In the U.S. alone, Black Friday spending topped $36 billion across all channels [source]. The average shopper dropped around $325 during Black Friday and Cyber Monday [source]. Not bad for a long weekend!
For advertisers, it wasn’t just about pushing discounts, it was about growth.
2. Rising Costs, Tighter Margins
If you felt like ad space was more expensive this year… you’re not imagining it. As always, opportunity came with a price. Higher CPCs and CPMs, combined with aggressive bidding and more crowded marketplaces, made efficiency more critical than ever. Advertisers needed sharper targeting, optimized creatives, and flexible budgets to protect margins while maintaining visibility.
3. Shifting Channels and Attribution Challenges
Retail media networks and platform-driven ads continued to dominate. Brands that weren’t active in these environments often found themselves at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, visibility into pure affiliate performance remained limited. As paid placements and hybrid attribution models expand, affiliate-driven revenue is becoming harder to isolate, though its role in upper- and mid-funnel activity remains critical.
4. The New Black Friday: Longer, Not Louder
The Black Friday weekend isn’t just a weekend anymore. Brands are stretching out their offers over multiple weeks, some even the whole month of November. Instead of putting all their budget into one big day, advertisers are spreading spend across Q4 to keep visibility going. That “deal season” mindset is here to stay.
This approach helped sustain engagement throughout the holiday period, but it also means more competition for consumer attention across a longer timeframe.
5. The Next Era: AI, Personalization, and Value
AI tools will be the secret weapon for many advertisers. From smart bidding to personalized offers and dynamic pricing, automation will help campaigns react faster and perform better. Combining data-driven decisions with a human touch, knowing what your audience values and speaking directly to that.
Black Friday Advertising Tips from Our Partners
1. Cpamatica
“What we see right now, is that SEO traffic is declining due to Google updates, while TG traffic is booming. Speaking about paid CPC traffic from ad networks best results are achieved by the partners that find market inefficiencies in narrow traffic segments. “
2. 3SNET
“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the days when you can get the maximum profit because of discounts and promotions. But why limit yourself to just these days when 3SNET always offers benefits? Offers with uncap give you the opportunity to earn without limits.“
3. Yellana
“For fans of Betting and Gambling, in light of the Cricket World Cup in India, we have current offers that will let them experience incredibly exciting moments on the field and in the world of bets ”
4. Zeydoo
“In Zeydoo we see the increase in traffic volume from both our partners and our internal media buying team to Sweepstakes offers.”
Here are a few points to pay attention to while getting ready to start traffic to Sweepstakes offers before Black Friday:
- Pre-landers for Sweepstakes are a must-have. Usually, publishers use boxes or Fortune Wheels, but for Black Friday it’s better to have a theme-related pre-lander that will show some kind of tie to “Black Friday” with dates, discounts, time and item-limited offers.
- You can earn a lot with Sweepstakes offers if you can take into account the specifics of the GEO you’re working with: local peculiarities, the economic situation in the region, new trends etc.
- A good offer is half the success. Obviously, our team is releasing only the best in-house offers on the market. But to make a campaign successful every publisher should evaluate the level of interest in the offer in their chosen GEO. You need to understand that giving away a scooter in the US where they value having their own car won’t be the same as giving away an iPhone or an Amazon voucher.
- Test everything. Carry out A/B test – test pre-landers, landing pages, colors of buttons, creatives, texts, everything. Find the winning bundle and scale it. Start testing new sources with low daily spending and set limits for the campaign. This way you’ll be able to test the quality of traffic without losing much money. If you’ve already worked with Zeydoo, create a different stream for your new source so that we can optimize the funnel for your source. “
Use promo code ZEYDOO33 to get +33$ to your first payment.
Write the promo code to your manager or to our support to activate it.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I start my Black Friday advertising campaign?
Most advertisers begin teaser/awareness campaigns 2–3 weeks before Black Friday and ramp budget in the final week before the event, keeping campaigns live through Cyber Monday and often into the following week.
What ad formats work best for Black Friday?
Push and in-page push tend to work well for time-sensitive utility, finance, and dating offers; banners work well for price-drop and bundle promotion; popunders tend to perform for sweepstakes and betting offers. Match format to vertical and test before scaling.
Which verticals perform best during BFCM?
Historically: electronics, fashion, beauty, home goods, subscriptions, finance, dating, betting/iGaming, and sweepstakes(see the vertical breakdown above for why each aligns with BFCM shopper intent.)
Is Black Friday advertising more expensive than normal?
Yes. CPCs and CPMs typically rise during the peak BFCM window due to increased advertiser competition. Budget pacing and bid caps are the standard mitigation.
Bottom Line
Black Friday isn’t a single-day retail event anymore, it’s a multi-week acquisition and monetization window that rewards early planning, format-vertical matching, and post-event data discipline over flashy one-off discounts. The advertisers and affiliates who win are the ones treating it as a season-long strategy, not a 24-hour scramble.
Make Money With Mondiad!
Ready to put these Black Friday strategies into action? Join our ad network to access high-converting traffic sources, as well as the tools affiliate advertisers use to scale profitable campaigns during peak shopping season.
