Black Friday is the week ad costs climb the most. Every brand bids on the same people at the same time, so the stores that win are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that warmed up their audiences in October, fixed their tracking before the traffic arrived and had the creative ready before the week began.
This is the list we work through with our e-commerce clients from late October to early December. It covers Meta and Google Ads, but most of it applies to any paid channel. Black Friday 2026 falls on Friday 27 November and Cyber Monday on 30 November.
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Download nowThis is a preview, not the whole thing. The full checklist is 8 pages and comes free by email. Numbers in here come from our own accounts and are illustrative. Your margins and market will differ. The order of work will not.
I run Maison Mint, a boutique marketing agency in Tallinn that manages Google and Meta ads, does SEO and GEO, and builds the tracking underneath it, for brands growing across the EU. Everything in this checklist comes from accounts we run, not from a course.
The resources on this site are free because the people who find them useful are exactly the people we like working with. You get a short welcome series and then the occasional email with one tactic, one tool and one number. One click unsubscribes.
Black Friday 2026 is on Friday 27 November and Cyber Monday on 30 November. The checklist starts six weeks before, in mid-October, because tracking, feed and audience work has to be done before the traffic arrives.
No. If you start in November, skip to section three (offer and creative) and section four (running the week), then do the foundation checks as fast as you can. Tracking and the product feed come first even late.
Yes. Most points apply to both, and where a step is platform specific, such as Google Merchant Center promotions, seasonality adjustments or the Meta Conversions API, it says so.
Usually yes, but on campaigns that already convert, and against a break-even ROAS recalculated for your discounted prices. New campaigns launched in the sale week spend their learning phase at the most expensive prices of the year.
Yes. We manage Meta and Google Ads for e-commerce brands across Europe. Book a free 30 minutes and we will look at your account and your Q4 plan together.
Thirty opening lines for Facebook and Instagram ads, sorted by the job they do, with a note on when each one works
A one-evening, seven-page plan for a growing brand: goals, customer, channels, budget, 90-day calendar and KPIs
42 checks to get your brand cited by ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot
How to run Facebook and Instagram ads on 500 to 5,000 € a month without wasting half of it
B2B outreach that lands in the inbox, gets read and gets replies, GDPR included
All free resources live at mintagency.eu/resources. Ten free in-browser tools (ROAS calculator, UTM builder, SEO audit, ad copy generator and more) are on the blog.
Maison Mint runs Google and Meta ads, SEO and GEO, email and the tracking underneath for brands across the EU. The first 30 minutes are free and useful either way.
