Why Black Friday and Cyber Monday are different for Amazon ads
There are two forces that change the advertising game during BFCM: demand and CPCs.
Demand spikes as shoppers arrive ready to buy. Conversion rates climb, and well-positioned ASINs move volume they never see in a normal week. To give you an idea, ShipBob users saw 236% more sales on Black Friday in 2025 compared to an average Friday the previous month.
Second, CPCs rise. Every competitor raises bids at the same time. This pushes your CPC higher even if your bids stay flat.
The opportunity is real, but so is the cost pressure. Your profit depends on knowing your numbers and bidding within them.
Black Friday vs Cyber Monday for Amazon advertisers
The table below breaks down the key differences Amazon advertisers should plan around. Use it to divide your labor: Black Friday rewards aggressive scale on your top ASINs, while Cyber Monday rewards defense and retargeting as CPCs peak.
When should you start your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon campaigns?
Start your BFCM campaigns three to four weeks before Thanksgiving, but no later than around November 10. Early campaigns build organic rank on your target keywords before competition intensifies and gather conversion and search-term data you can use to optimize bids once the event starts.
Waiting until Cyber 5 (the five-day window from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) means you’ll enter the auction when CPCs are at their peak, with no organic rank to show for your spend.
How do you prepare your Amazon listings and campaigns for BFCM?
Preparation separates the brands that profit from the ones that overspend. Before traffic spikes, you need product detail pages that convert and a campaign structure that lets you control spend when it matters.
If you skip this work in October, you’ll have to work with weak listings and messy campaign structures in November. This becomes an issue because you’ll waste expensive holiday clicks and struggle to identify where to increase your budget.
Optimize your product detail pages for conversion
Higher conversion rate (CVR) lowers your effective ACoS. Every point of CVR improvement means the same ad spend generates more revenue at a lower cost per order.
To fix your listings before traffic arrives:
- Check titles for keyword relevance and clarity
- Verify that main images meet Amazon’s requirements and show the product clearly
- Review A+ Content for completeness
- Confirm you have at least 15 reviews with a 4.0+ star rating
💡Pro Tip: Audit your top 10 ASINs first.
Structure your campaigns before the surge
Campaign architecture determines how well you can control spend during the event. A clean structure lets you scale winners, pause slow-performers, and defend brand terms without one decision affecting everything else.
At Olifant Digital, we use the 1-1-1-1 Scaling Method: one product, one campaign, one ad group, and one keyword focus. This keeps bid and budget decisions isolated. For example, you can triple the budget on a converting exact-match campaign without lifting spend on the broad-match test campaigns running alongside it.
Also, separate BFCM budgets from evergreen campaigns. You want a clear distinction between your holiday and baseline performance so that you can evaluate both honestly.
For BFCM specifically, here’s how you can focus your campaigns:
How much should you bid and budget during BFCM?
The core discipline is simple: set your bid ceiling using your break-even ACoS, then raise budgets on winners (those ASINs already converting within your target ACoS).
Any budget decisions should follow current performance. Pause or cut ASINs that aren’t converting, regardless of how promising they looked in October. If you raise bids past your profitable threshold, even the higher conversion rates during BFCM won’t save you.
How do you calculate your break-even ACoS for holiday bids?
Your break-even ACoS is the number at which you make zero profit on an ad-driven order. To calculate it, you can use our ACoS calculator or this formula:
Break-even ACoS = (Selling Price − COGS − Amazon Fees − Shipping) ÷ Selling Price × 100
For example, in this scenario below, you’ll break even if you spend 40% of the $40 sale on ads ($16). To generate a profit, your ACoS must stay below 40%.
Your target ACoS is the ACoS you aim for to hit your profit goal.
💡Pro Tip: Bigger BFCM discounts shrink your ACoS ceiling. Run the math on your promo price before you set bids.
How should you scale budgets across the Cyber 5?
Budget increases are necessary to stay competitive, but the multiplier must be applied only to winners, not your entire account. Here’s how to increase budgets only on the ASINs that already proved themselves:
When is spending more the wrong move?
If the conditions to scale profitably aren’t in place, resist the pressure to raise your PPC budget across the board.
It’s better to defend if:
- You have low inventory and risk stocking out before Cyber Monday.
- Your promo price drops break-even ACoS below 20%.
- You have a new ASIN with no reviews and organic rank.
- Your detail page converts below 10%.
In each of these cases, it will be more cost-effective to defend your existing rank on your proven ASINs. Then, depending on the situation, you can also take these practical steps:
Which Amazon ad types work during Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
Each ad type has a job. Use the wrong ad at the wrong time and your budget will be wasted.
Sponsored products
Sponsored Products is your primary conversion driver and carries the conversion load during BFCM. As such, this is where most of your BFCM budget should go. Run exact-match campaigns on your top 10 to 20 keywords for hero ASINs.
Sponsored brands
During BFCM, competitors will target your brand terms and Sponsored Brands will defend your brand at the top of the search results. If you have strong assets, you can use video creative.
Sponsored display
Sponsored Display is useful for competitor targeting and reretargeting shoppers who viewed your detail page but didn’t buy. That said, it’s a support tactic and not a conversion driver like Sponsored Products. As such, keep your budget modest.
Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP supports both prospecting and retargeting, not only on Amazon-owned properties but also third-party sites. It requires a larger minimum spend and is best for brands already running full Sponsored Products coverage.
What should you do during BFCM to protect profit?
As the auction changes hourly, your BFCM campaigns need daily management. To ensure profitability, apply this daily to-do list during Cyber 5:
With this daily cadence, one search-term harvest on Black Friday morning can redirect hundreds of dollars toward converting queries by Cyber Monday.
What should you do after BFCM to keep the momentum?
BFCM ends; the work doesn’t. These post-BFCM actions will help protect your wins:
- Decrease bids gradually over five to seven days as traffic normalizes to avoid abrupt cuts that can hurt the organic rank you built during the event.
- Move every exact-match keyword you harvested and validated during Cyber 5 and top-performing ASINs to your evergreen campaigns.
- Measure your total advertising cost of sales (TACoS) against total holiday revenue to see how dependent your total revenue is on paid ads (a spike means your organic sales didn’t keep pace with ad spend).
- Capture new-to-brand (NTB) orders for remarketing in December and next year’s Q1.
Along with the bid tapering, your BFCM performance should be reviewed within seven days of Cyber Monday. This gives you enough time to update your keyword list and campaign structure by mid-December so that when the January lull hits you have campaigns restructured based on holiday learnings.
How Olifant Digital approaches Black Friday and Cyber Monday
At Olifant Digital, we manage over $100 million in annual client revenue on Amazon across over 50 accounts. These are the methods we apply on our clients’ accounts.
Every Olifant account is optimized daily during BFCM. Our team of senior Amazon specialists reviews bids, budgets, search terms, and placements using our 1-1-1-1 Scaling Method. This way, we can isolate budget decisions and scale winners without dragging slow-performing ASINs and keywords along.
The team also uses our in-house AI platform, Olifant AI, which powers their execution. This hybrid approach means that AI is always applied with real human insight drawn from years of experience.
All of this is included in our pricing that starts at $2,000 per month.
While BFCM spans over only five days, we value long-term partnerships. This is one of the reasons why every engagement is backed by our 60-day money-back guarantee on management fees.
Get a free marketing plan to see what profitable BFCM management looks like for your brand.
Frequently asked questions
When should I start my Amazon Black Friday ad campaigns?
Amazon sellers should start their BFCM campaigns three to four weeks in advance, no later than early-to-mid November. This gives you time to build organic rank and gather conversion data before CPCs peak during Cyber 5.
How much should I increase my Amazon ad budget for BFCM?
Scale winners 2 to 3x at the peak of BFCM while holding your break-even ACoS ceiling. Don’t raise bids blindly, but apply budget increases to ASINs that are already converting within your target ACoS.
Which Amazon ad type works best on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?
The best approach is using a combination of ads, but with Sponsored Products receiving the majority of your BFCM budget. Sponsored Products should be used for conversion, backed by Sponsored Brands for brand defense and Sponsored Display or DSP for retargeting.
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Alex is the founder and CEO of Olifant Digital, where his team manages over $100M in annual Amazon client revenue across 50+ brands, and he runs a 7-figure Amazon brand of his own. That operator background shapes how the agency works: every tactic is tested with his own money before it reaches a client account. He oversees PPC methodology, creative, and conversion rate across all client accounts to make sure Olifant Digital scales brands profitably.
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Mike reviews every Amazon article on this blog for strategic and technical accuracy before it publishes. As Director of Amazon Growth at Olifant Digital, he sets marketing strategy across client accounts and personally audits PPC at every stage of growth. He brings 8 years of daily Amazon operations across 7 and 8-figure brands including Beauty by Earth, Ekster, and Bullstrap, the kind of hands-on depth most agency directors delegate away.
