Black Friday product feeds: a timeline and checklist

Black Friday is the week when product feeds are asked to do things they don't do the rest of the year: prices that change at midnight, a campaign that starts in one time zone and ends in another, stock that runs out by lunchtime. Most of what goes wrong was decided weeks earlier — a sale price sent the wrong way, a title rule someone meant to remove, a promotion submitted too late for review.

This guide is a timeline. It says what to prepare in your product feeds, in which order, and what to take out again afterwards. The dates are for 2026: Black Friday is 27 November, Cyber Monday is 30 November, and 11.11 falls on a Wednesday.

The timeline at a glance

1. Fix the price you will strike through

A discount is only as convincing as the price it is compared with — and Google checks that price. Its sale price annotation — the struck-through price next to the new one — appears only when:

• the regular price was charged for 30 days within the past 200 days (for Shopping ads in the US: 5 days within the past 30, or 15 within the past 200);
• the sale price is lower than the regular price;
• the discount is greater than 5% and less than 90%;
• the landing page shows both prices.

Google adds that annotations "aren't always guaranteed to show", even then. The consequence for October is simple: don't raise a price shortly before the campaign to make the discount look larger. It won't qualify, and in many countries price-reduction rules forbid it anyway.

Use the same weeks to clear what is already wrong. A product that is disapproved for a missing GTIN or a price mismatch in October is still disapproved in the last week of November, when it matters most.

2. Send the discount as a sale price, with dates

Keep price as the regular price and put the campaign price in sale_price. Add sale_price_effective_date with the start and the end, separated by a slash:

price                       129.00 EUR
sale_price                  89.00 EUR
sale_price_effective_date   2026-11-27T00:00+0100/2026-11-30T23:59+0100

Three details decide whether this works:

• Time zone. Without one, Google reads the times as UTC. A sale that starts at midnight in Istanbul or Berlin starts hours late if the offset is missing.
• No dates means now. Google's specification says that without the date range "the sale price will be used for your product immediately". Sending next week's price without dates starts the sale today.
• The page must agree. At 00:00 the store, its structured data and the feed have to say the same price. A sale that is live in the feed but not yet in the store is a price mismatch, and Google treats mismatches as serious.

Most store platforms export a sale price and its dates when you schedule the discount there. Let the store be the source of the price; the feed should carry it, not invent it.

3. Keep the campaign out of your titles

It is tempting to prefix every title with "BLACK FRIDAY -40%". For Google feeds, don't: the title rules say "Don't include promotional text. Don't add information such as price, sale price, sale dates, shipping, delivery date, other time-related information, or your company's name", and "Don't use capital letters for emphasis". Products with such titles can be disapproved — in the one week you can't afford it. A good title describes the product, as in the ten rules of title optimization.

The campaign belongs elsewhere:

• in the sale price, which the channel turns into a visible discount;
• in a promotion (below);
• in ad copy and campaign names;
• on channels that allow designed images in catalog ads — Meta, TikTok, Pinterest — in an image with the price and the discount on it.

If old campaign words are still in your titles or descriptions from last year, this is the moment to find them.

4. Mark the campaign's products

Bidding needs to tell campaign products apart from the rest. That takes a segment and a label:

• Decide the list: discounted products, or a hand-picked selection.
• Give those products a custom label — custom_label_2 = black_friday, for example — so a campaign or a listing group can target them.
• Keep the label's meaning stable. If label 2 is "season or campaign" all year, the campaign structure in the ad account doesn't have to change in November; only the members do.

Useful second segments: products with a discount of 30% or more, best sellers that are in the campaign, and campaign products with low stock — which you may want to bid on less, not more.

5. Submit promotions early

A sale price changes what one product costs. A promotion adds an offer on top: a code, free shipping above a basket value, a gift. Google shows promotions on Shopping ads and free listings in 13 countries (among them the US, the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands — not Türkiye), and it "reviews all promotions against program policies and editorial requirements before displaying them". So a promotion created on Thursday night may not be live on Friday morning.

Create promotions at least a few days ahead with their real start date. Products are linked to a promotion through promotion_id in the product feed, and that ID can be in the feed from the day you create the promotion — the review can then finish before the campaign starts.

6. Tag your links

When the week is over you will want to know which channel sold what. That needs link parameters that your analytics understands, per feed: utm_source=google, utm_medium=cpc, utm_campaign=black_friday on the Google feed, utm_source=facebook and utm_medium=paid_social on the Meta feed, and so on. Two cautions:

• Add the parameters in the feed, not in the store, and keep the link's own query string — a ?variant= that selects the right variant must survive.
• On Google and Microsoft, parameters on the product link also apply to free listings. If you want only ads tagged, put the tagged address in the ads-only link (ads_redirect) and leave the product link clean.

7. Schedule the changes, then preview them

By now there is a list of feed changes that must happen at a certain moment: a campaign label, a filter that narrows a feed to the campaign's products, perhaps a different title template on a channel that allows it. Changes made by hand at midnight are the ones that go wrong, and the ones nobody remembers to undo.

Give every campaign rule a start and an end, and look at the result before it is live: what does the feed contain on 27 November at 00:01? What on 1 December? If your tool can't preview a future date, build the campaign version as a copy of the feed and compare the two.

Mind the clock. "Midnight" is midnight in the store's time zone, and a feed that is rebuilt at 03:00 carries Thursday's rules for the first three hours of Friday unless something rebuilds it at the boundary.

8. Keep price and stock fresh on the day

During the week the feed's enemy is delay. A feed is a file, and nothing about a file is real-time: a change reaches the ads when the feed has been rebuilt and the channel has fetched it again.

• Sync your store and rebuild feeds as often as you can for the week — hourly or better.
• Set the channel's fetch schedule to match; a feed rebuilt every 30 minutes helps little if it is fetched once a day.
• Sold-out products should leave the feed, or be sent as out of stock, quickly. Clicks on sold-out products are paid for and wasted.
• Check a sample of product pages against the feed every day of the week. The six usual causes of a mismatch — VAT, sale timing, a default variant, stale structured data, currency, stock — are all more likely now.

9. Clean up afterwards

On Tuesday, look at the feed again. Campaign labels should be gone, filters back to normal, sale prices ended — check the sale_price_effective_date of a few products — and the sync interval back to what your plan and your store are comfortable with. Promotions that ended should have ended in the promotions file too. Then note what you would do earlier next year, while you still remember it.

How FeedManager does it

Each step above maps to something in FeedManager.

Scheduled rules and filters. Every rule and every filter group has Active from and Active until, in your account's time zone. A campaign-date picker fills them for 11.11, Black Friday week, Black Friday itself, Cyber Monday and New Year. The feed is rebuilt at the moment a window starts or ends — also a feed you normally build by hand — and a Schedule card on the Rules tab lists every dated change, with your promotions on feeds that send promotion IDs. Preview as on shows the feed as it will be at a date and time you choose. More on the Features page.

Wording checks. Builds flag promotional text and capitals in titles and descriptions — on by default for Google Merchant Center feeds — and one click adds the rule that removes the flagged words. Last year's "Black Friday" in a title is found before Google finds it.

Segments and labels. Tag the campaign's products in bulk as a product tag, or let a dynamic tag such as Big discounts collect them, and set a custom label for "has the tag".

Promotions. Promotions (Standard and up) are created next to your feeds, for all products or one tag's products; FeedManager writes the promotion's ID into those products in your Google feeds and publishes the promotions file.

Link parameters. Each feed has up to ten name=value parameters, with a Suggest button for the channel's usual set; Google and Microsoft feeds can tag the ads link only.

Fresh prices and stock. Between full reads, Shopify and WooCommerce syncs read only what changed; with Instant updates (Pro and above) the store reports a change and the product is read again about a minute later. A Google feed can then send the new price, sale price and availability to Merchant Center within minutes, ahead of the file — see instant price and stock updates. And Page Checks compares a daily sample of product pages with the rows your feeds send.

None of this replaces the first step: a real price, charged long enough, in a store whose pages say what the feed says. The rest is timing — and timing is what a schedule is for.

Frequently asked questions