Prime Big Deal Days vs Black Friday: how we split Q4 Amazon budget

How do Prime Big Deal Days and Black Friday differ for sellers?

Prime Big Deal Days ran on October 6 and 7, 2026, and the deals were only available to Prime members.

This year, Black Friday falls on November 27, and the sales last all weekend long through Cyber Monday on November 30. Many of the sellers we work with also participate in Thanksgiving sales the day before, and when you consider all five of those days together, people refer to it as Cyber Five.

The difference is not the size of the discounts but the type of shoppers each attracts and the length of the expensive period.

In October, most of the shoppers are searching for early gifts or to stock up on some items they already use. Black Friday shoppers, on the other hand, are in gift-buying mode and hunting for deals.

In this table we compare both events:

In October, you build the audience and ranking, and in November, you cash in on both.

Which event deserves more of your Q4 Amazon budget?

You need to boost your Q4 Amazon spend for Black Friday week, because four or five days of peak demand need more money than two.

But Prime Big Deal Days still matter. It gets you conversion data, organic rank, and new-to-brand customers, meaning people buying from your brand on Amazon for the first time.

Your retargeting audiences for November are those new-to-brand customers. It costs a lot less to win back a shopper who looked at your product in October and didn’t buy it than to win over a shopper who has never seen your brand before.

That’s why we never consider October to be a stand-alone event, even if it gets the smaller share.

How we split the Q4 Amazon budget across both events

This split is the operating framework we use at Olifant Digital and the percentages are based on our own account work and not an industry benchmark.

If you're interested in how we split budgets across individual campaigns, our guide on how we allocate Amazon ad budgets walks you through it step by step.

What is the default split?

The table below explains what each phase does and how much of the budget it receives based on a $100,000 Q4 ad budget.

Our worked default is 22% ($22,000) in October, 60% ($60,000) in November and 18% ($18,000) in December. That is $100,000 total and November is almost 3 times what October is getting.

When should you lean more toward October?

We only advance October to 30% when an account satisfies all four of the below points. If we don’t have all four, we stick with the normal split because the extra money in October usually isn’t worth it.

Conversion rate: Your conversion rate for October (the percentage of clicks that convert into orders) needs to be within 10% of your Black Friday week conversion rate from last year.

Deal eligibility: Your best-selling products need to be eligible for Prime Big Deal Days deals; otherwise, the additional budget in October has a lot less to spend.

Stock: Get your inventory in before Amazon’s October 21 and October 28 Black Friday deadlines so that the extra October spend doesn’t leave you short in November.

Reorders: This is the playground of consumables. The first-time buyers you win in October have time to come back and buy again before Black Friday.

In simple terms, if your products are selling almost as well in October as they did during Black Friday week last year, then October has a bigger slice of the pie.

It works vice versa, too. We drop October's share to 15% for giftable products that primarily sell in late November or when inventory is low.

If you'd like to allocate more to October, consider reducing November's share first while maintaining December at 15% or higher to ensure there's still budget available for retargeting.

How do you split the budget inside each event?

Within each event, we separate the budget into four types of campaigns and each has its own job.

Testing campaigns receive the smallest share. They experiment with new keywords and new products and we keep them small during events because peak days are not the time to experiment.

The biggest chunk goes to scaling campaigns, as they run on the already profitable keywords and products.

Ranking campaigns are for the keywords you want to rank for in the regular Amazon search results, where you don’t pay per click. Event sales drive your product higher in those results for weeks afterward.

Brand defense campaigns show your ads to people who search for your brand name or look at your product pages.

If you still haven't set them up, you're giving competitors an advantage by letting them put their ad right there and pull in someone who was actually looking for you. This is why during big events, we invest more money in these campaigns.

In the accounts we work with, these shoppers are generally very cheap to win so losing them to a competitor is a loss you can easily avoid.

How do you pace your budget so you do not run out on event day?

We see the same thing happen again and again on a lot of the accounts we audit after a big sales event. The daily budget was well within range and the campaign ran out of money sometime around lunchtime so for the rest of the day the ads just stopped being shown to anyone.

Think of it this way. You open a shop on the busiest shopping day of the year but you lock the door at noon because that is what you do on a normal Tuesday. Shoppers who planned to come this afternoon went to the next-door shop because you're closed, and this is precisely what happens with your Amazon ads on event days when no one changes the budget.

To avoid this scenario, we increase the daily budgets by 20 to 30% about three to five days before each big event, and then we gradually increase them as the event approaches, instead of making all these adjustments on the day itself.

If you want to see more about how this process works, check our Black Friday Amazon ads strategy guide.

How should you pace Prime Big Deal Days?

Since the 2026 event has already occurred Oct. 6 and 7, most of what we describe below is something you can save and use next October. The last one is the one that is most relevant to your account and it’s about what you do in the days after the event is over.

We typically start ramping up the daily budgets about 20 to 30% three to five days before the event. However, we do not apply this procedure to the entire account. We only raise budgets on campaigns that were profitable over the previous 2 weeks, because there is no point in putting more money into campaigns that lose money on a normal day.

On each of the two event days, someone from our team is monitoring the budgets hourly. We’ll watch a campaign make money up to its daily cap and put more budget back into it within the hour instead of letting it stop and only seeing it the next morning when the sales are gone.

Once the event is over, we continue to run the retargeting ads for another week or two. These are the ads that pop back up to people who saw your product or purchased your product during the event.

In our experience, a good number of them do come back and purchase once the rush has died down. If you are starting to plan your ad spend for next year’s event, refer to our Amazon advertising forecasting guide that walks you through how we do it.

How should you pace Black Friday through Cyber Monday?

For Black Friday, we never raise the budgets in one single go. About a week or two passes before we bump up the daily budget to about one and a half times what it normally is so the campaigns have time to settle.

The budget is two or three times higher than normal from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday is usually our busiest day, so we push the hardest then.

We cut it back a little bit in the first week of December and then it goes back to normal. We watch the budgets every hour and see what shoppers are looking for every day. We also look at what we spent on ads vs. total sales on a weekly basis, because that’s how we know if the ads helped the whole business or just the ad orders.

How does inventory change the budget split?

This scenario is something we see a lot in Q4. A shopper clicks on an ad and goes to the product page and the product is out of stock. You paid for that click and got nothing in return. Clicks are more expensive in Q4 than any other time of the year so the amount of stock you have determines how much we allow a product to spend on ads.

Amazon has three deadlines for sellers to ship stock ahead of Black Friday in 2026. If your stock is going to Amazon’s storage warehouses first, you need to get it there by October 14.

If it goes straight to the warehouses that pack and ship your orders, you have until either October 21 or October 28, depending on how Amazon breaks up the shipment. Stock arriving after these dates may not be ready to sell when the Black Friday shoppers hit the stores.

For stock checks, we calculate how many weeks of selling at Black Friday speed a product has before it runs out. We want to have about two months' stock of each product we are advertising as we move into November.

We cut ad spend on products with less than a month left and give that money to products that have plenty of stock. You can see the full plan in our Q4 Amazon preparation checklist.

How do you measure which event paid off?

Most sellers just look at the ad report of that day and in our experience, that is usually where the wrong decisions come from.

When we review an event for a client, the ad report is not the first thing we check. We examine total sales for the surrounding weeks and the percentage of these orders coming from customers who had never purchased from that brand before.

The ad report alone doesn’t show the regular orders and repeat buyers that keep coming back for weeks after the event is over.

We had this happen to us with products that people use up and buy again. The ads cost more than the product sold on a peak day and the report made the day look like a loss. A lot of those same buyers came back a few weeks later and ordered again with no ad involved, so it ended up being worth it.

We do the math on each product to see how much we can spend on ads before a sale becomes unprofitable, so for the big days we already know what the limit is before Q4. If you want to read more about this, our guide to comparing ad costs to total sales explains it, and the table below is what we use to score each event.

Use this scorecard as your budget talking points for next year. In each row, the split moves one number so you can see when the next Q4 comes.

Common mistakes when splitting the Q4 budget

The most significant mistake we see is treating Prime Big Deal Days like it’s the main event. It sucks up both budget and inventory pre-Black Friday and November comes up short when demand is at its peak.

Another mistake is keeping normal daily budget limits during Cyber Five. Profitable campaigns end before peak hours and those sales go to the competitors who planned for it.

Some sellers also turn off ads altogether after an event and so first-time buyers they paid to win never see a retargeting ad. The last mistake is to apply the same bids and goals for the two events, when October is a build job and November is a sales job.

Remember that spend only scales as far as your listing converts. If your conversion rate is low compared to your category, fix the product page before Q4, either with our Amazon listing optimization services or with a rebuild in-house.

Decision block: weight October or weight November?

Choose the column where most statements are true for your account.

If you have answers in both columns, use the default split and change it next year when you have your scorecard.

How we handle Q4 budget at Olifant Digital

We have senior specialists with 7+ years of Amazon experience working on each account every day and our proprietary AI platform, Olifant AI, analyzes every account daily and flags wasted spend and campaigns that are about to run out of budget.

We do an audit on the account in September, work out the profit point for each product and test keywords.

We are funding the build phase at 20 to 25% in October and ramping budgets ahead of Prime Big Deal Days. When November begins we score October, change the split, and run the Black Friday budget increases. December is about retargeting event buyers, stepping budgets down and drafting next year’s split.

We structure campaigns using our 1-1-1-1 Scaling Method, our framework for structuring Amazon ads. You get a weekly results call and a dedicated Slack channel.

This profit-first strategy led to Balanced Tiger’s Amazon revenue growth of 171% in 2 months, with ACoS cut by 50%. Our services start from $2,000 per month and are custom for each project, based on the complexity and workload required.

Every engagement comes with a 60-day guarantee: if we don't improve your performance, you don't pay.

FAQs

Do you need to run a deal to benefit from Prime Big Deal Days?

While a deal certainly helps, it’s not the only way to get value from the event. Many shoppers browse Prime Big Deal Days and purchase products that are not on sale. Your ads can still capture that extra traffic.

Without a deal badge, your conversion rate is usually lower than your discounted competitors. This is why we keep bids closer to normal on products that aren’t part of the event.

Does this split work for a brand going into its first Q4 on Amazon?

It does, but with one change. A first Q4 does not have the conversion history of the year before so the 10% test can’t be run yet.

Then we stay at the low end for October, around 20% and consider the event mostly a data-gathering exercise. What you learn in October then informs how hard you push in November and it becomes your baseline for the next year.

Should you raise bids or budgets first before a peak event?

Budgets first, always. We’ve seen sellers in our accounts increase their bids in the lead up to an event while keeping their budget the same.

Then the campaign spends its money even faster and stops airing ads before the afternoon shoppers come in. Then we bid higher on the keywords that produce the most sales but only incrementally until the budget is big enough to last till the end of the day and we check the hourly cost per sale.

How do you set the total Q4 ad budget before splitting it?

We take last year’s Q4 ad spend and the sales it produced and adjust for the stock you have coming in this year.

If you have less inventory, your total budget will go down as well, because there is no point paying for clicks that you can’t fill. This phase is also when new products and categories with more competition are considered.

Does the split change for brands selling in more than one Amazon marketplace?

The logic is the same regardless of the marketplace, but the dates and deadlines don’t always line up.

Event days and inventory cut-offs may be different by country. Instead of applying one split to all, we build a separate calendar for each marketplace and set the percentages for each country.

What happens to ad spend in January after the Q4 push?

January is usually a slow month and CPC usually decreases after the holidays. We use this time to review the scorecard, cut the keywords that didn’t pay off and keep the best Q4 campaigns running at normal budget.

Final thoughts

Black Friday week takes the biggest chunk of your Q4 Amazon budget and October is there to build the data, rank and first-time buyers that November spends on. You can vary from the default split if your October conversion rate is within 10% of last year’s Black Friday week and your stock arrives on time. Now, your best bet is to compare this year’s Prime Big Deal Days to last year’s Black Friday results and check your inventory ahead of the October 28 deadline.

If you’d like Olifant Digital to plan this split for your own account, get your free marketing plan and we’ll map out your October, November and December budget based on your numbers.