Black Friday: searches drop, budget needs to be redistributed

Searches for "Black Friday" in the UK are down 36% compared with 2019, yet Q4 ad spend keeps growing. You're concentrating your budget on the most expensive weekend of the year while your customers have been searching for deals since October.

Is it still worth betting everything on the Black Friday weekend?

No, or at least not only. The data shows demand spreads across all of November, while ad costs spike precisely on the weekend: concentrating your budget in those two days means paying more to reach fewer people.

For years the logic was simple: put your budget on Friday, collect the orders. In 2026, that logic has a serious problem. Black Friday-related searches in the UK have dropped 36% compared with 2019, according to an analysis of 19 search terms by the agency Marketing Signals, reported by PPC Land. Meanwhile, cost per click keeps rising.

The problem isn't that consumers have stopped buying. It's that they search differently: more spread out over time, more focused on specific products and brands, less tied to "Black Friday" as a generic label.

What does the data really say: have searches shifted or disappeared?

They've shifted. Demand hasn't evaporated, but it has been diluted across all of November and has moved from generic terms to searches for products, brands and promotion dates.

Marketing Signals' analysis covers six years, from November 2019 to November 2025, across 19 UK search terms. The numbers show three declines and one increase. Generic terms like "Black Friday" are down 36%. Deal-related queries are down 40%. Searches pairing a store name with the sale have collapsed by 68%.

On the other side, queries asking when promotions start and end have grown 39%. A single phrase — "when does Black Friday end" — is up 439%, although it started from a small base and the figure should be read with caution.

The agency's interpretation is straightforward: consumers are still searching for deals, but they do it across all of November, starting as early as late October, and they look for products and brands more than the day's generic label.

It's worth noting a methodological limit: keyword research tools measure monthly volumes. Knowing that November searches have dropped doesn't automatically prove they moved to October — that part is the agency's interpretation, not a direct data point. Italian data, however, points in the same direction.

What about Italy? Does the market behave the same way?

Yes, with even sharper numbers. In Italy, Black Week is worth almost €5 billion, and two-thirds of shoppers use it to get a head start on Christmas gifts, beginning their searches as early as October.

The Italian market tells the same story with its own numbers. According to Confcommercio, Black Week turnover in Italy reached about €4.9 billion in 2025, up 20% from the previous year and 145% from 2018. The growth is real, but it's spread over a whole week, not a single day.

According to the Netcomm–Politecnico di Milano B2c eCommerce Observatory, Italians spent about €2.2 billion online between Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2025, with 34.9 million active shoppers across the ten days of deals. Not one day: ten.

The most useful figure for anyone planning campaigns comes from another Confcommercio survey: 66.7% of Italians use Black Week to get a head start on Christmas shopping, up from 64.3% in 2024. And according to Netcomm data cited in industry analysis, 60% of shoppers start looking for deals between October and early November, while 75% begin searching before mid-November.

In practical terms: if your campaigns start on November 25, you're late for more than half of your potential audience.

Why does concentrating your budget on the weekend cost so much?

Because every advertiser does the same thing at the same time: the ad auction overheats and cost per click jumps, right when generic demand is at an all-time low.

Ad auctions, the system platforms like Google and Meta use to decide who shows an ad and at what price, work on supply and demand. When every brand raises its budget in the same weekend, the price of each click goes up. According to IAB UK and Superads data, the average CPC (cost per click) on Facebook in the UK was £1.02 in October 2025 and £1.49 in December 2025: a 46% increase in two months.

There's also a performance figure to consider: according to Channable data on €1.38 billion of European e-commerce spend, cost per click on Google rose 15% between June 2025 and June 2026, with ROAS (return on ad spend) down 46% on Performance Max. You pay more and earn less for every euro invested.

The Marketing Signals analysis adds a useful detail on the relationship between click cost and product price. A click on a search for a game console costing several hundred pounds leaves plenty of room, even if many clicks don't convert. A click on a search for a garment costing a few dozen pounds leaves very little room for error. For low-priced products, keyword control and campaign timing become even more critical.

Are deeper discounts enough to offset the drop in demand?

No, the data clearly shows it doesn't. In UK Black Friday 2025, the share of products discounted by 15% or more rose to 50%, yet tech and durables sales fell in almost every category.

Many brands responded to the drop in interest by increasing discounts. The logic is understandable, but the results don't support it. According to NielsenIQ, in UK Black Friday 2025 the share of products with a discount of 15% or more rose from 45% in 2024 to 50% in 2025. Even so, sales of technology and durable goods fell in almost every category. The only exception was personal care, which grew by 4%.

The problem isn't how deep the discount is: it's when you announce it. If shoppers have already decided and bought by mid-November, showing up with an offer on November 28 means chasing demand that has already dried up.

A similar signal comes from Europe. According to Criteo, on Black Friday 2024 online transactions in Europe grew 10% compared with 2023, but total spend fell 4%: more purchases, but at lower prices. Consumers look for deals, but they find them (and grab them) before the big day.

Three real-world scenarios: what changes for an e-commerce store, a physical shop and a service company?

Timing, keyword choice and budget distribution change. Every type of business has a different lever, but the direction is the same: widen the time window of your campaigns.

These are illustrative scenarios: the numbers show the logic and are not real client data.

If you manage Google Ads campaigns, it's also worth reading the analysis on how budget priority and allocation by channel are changing: the reasoning on timing applies to where you put your money as well, not just when.

How do you redistribute your paid media budget across November?

With a phased plan that starts in late October, you use different keywords in different weeks and keep the budget peak not on Black Friday weekend, but in the days before.

Which tools and channels work best for a distributed strategy?

There's no single winning channel: it depends on the product and the audience. The key is to use different channels at different times, with consistent messages.

Choose your channels based on where your audience is at each stage. People actively looking for a product are on Google Search. People who don't yet know what they want are on Meta or TikTok. People who need to convince a colleague or a boss are on LinkedIn. To dig deeper into measuring returns across different channels, the article on how to measure ROI in creator marketing and events offers a framework that's useful for holiday campaigns too.

What are the most common mistakes when planning a holiday budget?

The most common one is waiting too long. The second is using last year's keywords without checking whether the demand is still there.

Planning holiday campaigns with a 2019 mindset is the main problem. But there are other recurring mistakes worth avoiding, especially if you manage campaigns on behalf of a company or a client.

A less visible but equally costly mistake concerns attribution: knowing which campaign generated the sale is essential to deciding where to put your money next year. On this topic, the article on how to prove the impact of marketing on revenue offers a practical starting point.

How can you tell if the new strategy is really working?

Look at cost per conversion week by week, not just the total for the period. If the distribution works, you'll see steadier conversions and a lower average CPC than last year.

The risk of a distributed strategy is not knowing whether it's working until it's too late to correct course. You need clear indicators, monitored often.

Why it's being discussed now: is the paid media market really changing?

Yes. Ad spend is growing, but search behavior changes faster than budgets do. If you don't adapt your strategy, you pay more to reach fewer people.

The market context makes this topic urgent. In the UK, search advertising spend reached £17.9 billion in 2025, 44% of all digital spend, according to IAB UK. Spend is growing, but organic demand tied to Black Friday is falling. The gap closes at advertisers' expense.

On top of that, the way consumers discover products is changing. As discussed in the article on how AI has changed the buyer and made many marketing plans obsolete, more and more people use AI tools to compare products and prices before they even open a traditional search engine. Black Friday is not immune to this shift.

According to Netcomm and the Politecnico di Milano Observatory, Black Friday alone accounts for 4.8% of all parcels shipped in Italy over the year, with the most competitive merchants making up to 3 times the revenue of an average day, at an average discount of 25% (source: Bitmat/Netcomm). The potential is there. But capturing it means showing up earlier and smarter, not just spending more on the weekend.

So, is it worth rethinking your holiday strategy for your company?

It's worth it if you have an e-commerce store or a network of shops running paid campaigns, and in recent years you've seen CPC rise and ROAS drop over the Black Friday weekend. Spreading your budget over 6 weeks with product keywords lets you capture demand where it really is, at lower costs.

Somewhere in between if you manage campaigns for a company with less pronounced seasonality or a long sales cycle. It's worth auditing the timing of your holiday campaigns, but it doesn't have to be a top priority this season.

Not yet if you sell products or services whose demand is completely independent of the holiday period, or you already have a strategy spread across all of November with product keywords. In that case, you're already ahead of most of the market.

How we see it at SHM

For us, Black Friday is a maturity test for every paid media strategy. Not because it's technically difficult, but because it exposes a widespread habit: allocating budget by routine, not by data. We believe marketing is the science of relationships, built on data and careful analysis, and the data says demand has shifted. Ignoring it means paying the highest price at the least efficient moment.

What we do in practice is start with an audit of past years' campaigns: when conversions actually came in, at what cost, on which keywords. Clients often discover that their peak efficiency wasn't Friday, but the Tuesday or Wednesday of the week before. From there, we build a realistic plan, not a replay of last year.

If you want to understand where your company's holiday budget is going, you can start with a review of your Google Ads strategy or your Meta campaigns. For B2B companies that want to reach decision makers before annual budgets close, LinkedIn campaigns are often the most underrated channel of the period. You can also explore the whole Marketing and performance ADV area for more practical insights.

Frequently Asked Questions

Black Friday isn't over: it has stretched across all of November, and if you show up on the 28th, you're chasing demand that has already made its choice.