Black Friday PPC: Peak Readiness Checklist 2026

Peak is no longer one weekend plus Christmas. It’s a five-month shopping season. But CPMs don’t peak until November, so brands that start brand-building in September and October can drive results at discount prices.

Somewhere in your Google Ads account, there’s a campaign called BF25 – Prospecting. It’s been paused since December. You’ll get to it soon. There’s no doubt about it.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s barely autumn, and nobody is ready to say the C-word yet.

But the brands we work with are already live. Prospecting campaigns are already running, audiences are building, and tracking is checked and signed off.

In the recorded webinar below, Floresco founder Sally Hunt covers why the season starts earlier than it used to, what happens to CPMs in Q4, and the jobs worth doing in your account now before it’s too late and CPMs are peaking.

Peak Readiness Checklist 2026

Below is the short version of the checklist from the video.

Why September Is Your Cheapest Peak Month

Q4 advertising costs more every year, across every platform.

Look at CPM trends across Google, Meta, and TikTok, and the same pattern repeats every year we have data for: a sharp spike through Q4. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, CPMs peak in November.

Why? Because every advertiser is bidding at the same time. More competition means more expensive clicks.

Takeaway: anything you do before November is cheaper. Build a warm audience now, at

September prices, and you can remarket to those people during peak instead of buying cold reach at the worst possible moment.

It works the other way too. Every weakness in your account gets more expensive as spend rises. A broken tag costs you less in September. But it could have a huge knock-on impact in November.

What Brands Overlook During Peak

Tracking. Yes, it’s the dullest item on any peak checklist, but it’s also the one that does the most damage. Potentially because it’s dull and can be difficult to understand.

Consent mode not configured. Channels double-counting. Conversions not registering. All of this feeds smart bidding, which will optimise towards whatever signal you give it, whether it’s correct or not. Run test transactions across every platform and every checkout option before you spend heavily. This needs to be working.

Measurement needs to be sorted out as early as possible as well. If you haven’t agreed how you’ll judge performance before peak’s peak arrives, you’ll just waste time defining it then. Our recommendation is to use one holistic model — marketing efficiency ratio (MER) works well — agreed by all stakeholders.

Finally, creative. Meta’s Andromeda system has made more people care about the importance of creative in today’s advertising landscape, which is a good thing. As spend rises, frequency rises, and ads fatigue faster, so plan the whole season’s creative now rather than the first fortnight.

And don’t send expensive traffic to a generic page (or, worse, the homepage). You’re about to pay peak prices for these clicks.

The video goes through all three areas properly, including Performance Max brand exclusions and what to do about Meta’s auto-enhancements.

💡 Further reading: for the wider picture on what’s performing right now, we covered it in What’s Working in eCommerce Advertising Right Now.

Brand Building Still Matters During Peak

There’s a temptation to treat peak as a pure short-term promotion campaign. Bigger discounts, louder ads, repeat and repeat until January.

But that’s an incredibly one-dimensional approach that will undermine your impact.

Binet and Field’s analysis of the IPA’s campaign effectiveness databank found that brands putting around 60% of budget into brand building saw stronger long-term growth than those weighted more heavily towards sales activation.

Google’s consumer research says something similar. Surveying shoppers across five European markets and the US in August 2025, it found 55% of European shoppers rank discounts as the top factor in their decision-making. But European shoppers also weigh brand reputation and product durability more heavily than US shoppers do, who lean harder on reviews.

So a small awareness budget in September, while impressions are cheap, primes an audience you can sell to later. That means when you do discount, you’re a brand somebody recognises rather than just a low price from a company they’ve never heard of.

Book a Peak Readiness Audit

In short, you need to start all of this earlier than you think.

September is when impressions are affordable, when audiences can be built slowly, and when a broken tag can be fixed before it costs you too heavily.

Want us to check your account? We’re running free peak readiness audits until 16 October. We’ll go through your Google and Meta accounts and send back an itemised list of the actions we’d take, plus any tracking fixes we find. If you’d rather take the list away and do it all yourself, that’s fine too.

Email Sally at sally.hunt@florescomedia.com to book one in.

And if you watch the webinar, get halfway through the tracking section and find something you’re unsure about, that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re happy to look at. Just get in touch.