6 Best Tips for Black Friday Facebook Ads to Boost Sales (338% ROAS Campaign)

Running Facebook Ads during Black Friday can be an extremely high return on spend activity, and help you boost massive sales. This case study shows you exactly how to run a successful Facebook campaign with 3X return on ad spend (ROAS).

I knew Black Friday Cyber Monday was going to be prime time for online advertising and I wanted to get in on the fun too. After spending the first few years growing the LeanneWong.Co blog with organic traffic strategies, I had a decent audience size of almost 6,000 web visitors and could invest in Facebook ads retargeting.

Surprisingly, the campaign results were much better than I had anticipated (planned to just break even).

The Black Friday Facebook ad campaign made a total revenue of $2,134 with an ad spend of $631.83.

This was a 338% Return on Ad Spend which netted $1,502.17 profit. The numbers are not enormous but I thought it was a healthy ROAS for very little ad spend.

Some things I did before launching my first Black Friday Facebook Ad campaign:

• Created profitable products that have proven to work
• Created a landing page specific for Black Friday sales and discounts
• Created product images and custom illustrations for ad creatives
• Installed my Facebook Pixel very early to allow Facebook to gather data
• Concurrently ran my always-on prospecting campaigns for lead generation. These campaigns were breaking even or making marginal profits and converting at a low cost per lead, so I kept them running during Black Friday.

So what I’d like to do today is breakdown everything that worked during this Black Friday Facebook campaign and hopefully, this could be helpful to some of you running ads too.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I will make a commission at no extra cost to you should you click through and make a purchase.

1. Set up retargeting campaign for Black Friday Cyber Monday Sale

A retargeting campaign is the best option to drive sales. That means running ads to your warm audience – people who have visited your website, engaged with your Facebook page, engaged with your Instagram, your email list.

I only had 1 retargeting Facebook campaign for Black Friday which ran at $100/day.

• Campaign objective: Conversions
• Campaign budget optimization: On
• Conversion Event: Purchase
• Ad sets: 5
• Ads: 5

2. Campaign set up

• Add start and end date. I started my campaign a few days earlier before Black Friday (27 Nov) and had sales conversions on the first day.
• Set a high daily budget. As Black Friday Cyber Monday occurs over a weekend, you have a very narrow window to run your campaign. You want to reach as many people as possible during this period. I ran the campaign at $100/day.
• Create 3-5 ad sets, but not too many. I think 4 ad sets would be sufficient for the campaign budget to be effectively distributed across each ad set.
• Set up your campaigns early. It could take up to a day for Facebook to review and approve your creatives. It takes longer to approve carousel ads.

3. Ad sets

• Each ad set contains one ad creative.
  • Use different creatives – different image designs and colors.
  • I had 5 ad set and 5 ads, each ad had a different image design but some had the same ad copy, so I could split test between creatives.

4. High performing ads and creatives

• The carousel ads did really well. I had 2 ad sets with a different carousel ad, and the purple one drove the most conversions.
• All my ad copies start with an emoji. I use plenty of ‘checkboxes’ or ‘ticks’ emojis when listing out benefits.
• The first two sentences in the ad copy communicate the value of the offer: Ready to finally master SEO? Get 5 of my most popular SEO courses for 40% OFF + snag $600 in bonuses.
• Best performing creative: Purple carousel ad. This set was already converting on the first day and ended up having the highest ad spend and highest ROAS.

5. Audience targeting

• Put all your warm audience groups in one custom audience.
  • Upload your email list
  • Create an audience group for website visitors (180 days)
  • Create an audience group for Instagram engagement (365 days)
• Do not add any interest targeting.
• Do not add any locations.

6. Campaign Optimization

For ad sets that were spending 10% of the daily budget but not converting by the 3rd day of the campaign, I switched them off. So the budget can be distributed to those that were converting. I switched off 2 ad sets by this time.

Now that I have been running several Facebook campaigns, I have noticed that every campaign will have 1 or 2 ad sets that barely spend. While the others continue to perform and convert.

So my thoughts on this:

• OK to remain on: ad sets that are slow to spend, and spend barely a few dollars throughout the campaign (essentially does not impact your campaign at all)
• NOT OK to remain on: ad sets that continue to consume daily budget and do not convert. Because you are spending money and not getting any results.
• NOT OK to remain on: ad sets that convert at a high CPA. Because you are overspending. This is the time to stop loss.

Especially for ad sets that convert at a high CPA, I would turn them off very quickly. 

To make this decision, I look at the only metric that matters which is conversions. And so, cost per conversion. The fancy term would be Cost per Acquisition (CPA). On Facebook Ads Manager, this is called Cost per Result.

Facebook Ad Experiments for Black Friday 2021

The next question is how to get a higher ROAS?

With the same products and ad creatives that convert at an avg. 3.38 ROAS, how could the campaign achieve more results at the same multiplier.

Would it be a matter of increasing ad spend? Increasing audience size?

Some Facebook Ad campaign experiments I would like to try for next year:

• Increase the daily budget from $100 to $300.
• Start the campaign earlier, 5 days before Black Friday.
• Increase my warm audience size.

Increasing my audience size is something I would need to do early, right now in fact.

I realize at this point that retargeting campaigns are where the money is. So the size of your warm audience will impact the scale of targeting and ad revenue potential.

Another idea I am considering is to run 2 retargeting campaigns – one for Black Friday, one for Cyber Monday / Post-Black Friday. This way, I can run the campaign over a longer period and still within the shopping season.

• I would schedule the Black Friday campaign from 22 Nov (Mon) – 28 Nov (Sun).
  • Black Friday specific ad creatives.
  • Black Friday discounts and deals.
  • Black Friday deals landing page.
• Then schedule the Cyber Monday campaign from 29 Nov – 5 Dec.
  • Cyber Monday specific ad creatives.
  • Cyber Monday discounts and deals.
  • Cyber Monday deals landing page.

How about you guys? Let me know your experience and results so far if you’ve also ran Black Friday / Cyber Monday Facebook Ads!