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By
David Carbines
3
mins read
●
Oct 30, 2025
Here’s the thing: Black Friday isn’t chaos. It just looks like chaos when you treat it the way everyone else does.
Content provided by: Pathfinder Marketing Team.
Black Friday doesn't reward the loudest brands, it rewards the smartest ones.
Every year, CPMs surge while margins compress under blanket discounts, Facebook claims credit for sales it didn’t actually influence, and most brands stumble out the other side exhausted, wondering why they’re not as profitable as they should be after their “biggest week ever.”
Here’s the thing: Black Friday isn’t chaos. It just looks like chaos when you treat it the way everyone else does. The brands that win don’t wing it, they engineer it. And here’s how.
When you discount, your profit structure changes in ways that catch most people off guard.
Say you normally sell a $50 product with a $25 contribution margin (what’s left after covering variable costs like materials, shipping, packaging, and transaction fees).
Now you run a 20% off sale and your price drops to $40, but those variable costs stay the same. Your contribution margin per sale drops from $25 to just $15. You discounted the price by 20%, but your actual profit per order shrunk by 40%, and that’s the part most brands miss.
This is why your old 3x ROAS target doesn’t work anymore. You can’t expect the same return when every order delivers less profit to your bottom line.
Before you scale spend, re-model your targets based on this new reality. If you were comfortable at 3x ROAS in October, maybe 4x is your new baseline during Black Friday just to stay profitable. Or if you’ve got strong lifetime value and repeat customers, maybe 2.5x works because you’ll earn it back when they reorder at full price.
Know your real ROAS target before you turn up the budget, and don’t celebrate hitting revenue goals while quietly torching profit in the background.
If you’re sitting at 80% net margins selling supplements with $2 COGS or running some kind of unicorn DTC brand that defies all logic, sure, throw a 50% off sale and brute force your way through on pure profit. Genuinely, we’re happy for you. Must be nice up there.
For everyone else operating in reality, where your best-performing ad just died for no reason and your 3PL is holding your inventory hostage with mysterious fees, let’s get smarter about this.
Perception of value matters more than the size of the discount. A straight 30% off sale demolishes your margin, but “Buy 3, Save 30%” still feels like 30% off to the customer, except now they’re spending $105 instead of $50.
Here are three frameworks that actually work:
Your goal isn’t to discount everything just because it’s Black Friday. It’s to design offers that drive higher AOV, not just order volume that doesn’t move the needle on profit.
Facebook’s default attribution setting counts conversions from anyone who merely saw your ad, even if they never clicked it and even if they bought three days later after seeing your organic posts, getting your email, and searching on Google.
During Black Friday, when you’re carpet-bombing your audience from every possible angle, your attribution report becomes one of those group projects where everyone claims they did all the work. Someone sees your ad, scrolls past it, Googles the category, clicks through three sites, and finally buys from you because your checkout worked properly. Facebook claims the win, Google celebrates, and your email platform takes a victory lap while everyone’s ROAS looks amazing on paper.
Meanwhile, your bank account is sitting there like, “…so where’s all this money everyone keeps talking about?”
Facebook’s like that coworker who was cc’d on one email and now puts the entire project on their resume with a bullet point that says, “I was present when value was created, basically me, right?”
Here’s the fix:
Go into your Ad Set settings and find the Attribution Setting section (at the bottom of the Conversion section). Change from “7-day click or 1-day view” to “7-day click” only. You can only adjust this on draft ad sets, so if you’ve got campaigns running, duplicate them first.
Your numbers will drop when you make this change, and that’s fine. That’s just reality crashing the party your reports were throwing. This is how you separate campaigns that actually drive sales from campaigns that were just nearby when sales happened.
Real profitability starts with clean data, because if your numbers lie, your strategy dies.
Your creative’s job isn’t to be clever or win awards. It’s to make the discount feel real and the decision feel easy for someone who’s being bombarded with offers from every direction.
Be specific with your messaging: “Black Friday: Buy 3, Save 30%” beats a vague “Black Friday Sale” every single time. People need to know exactly what they’re getting without having to think about it.
Make it visually obvious with large text, contrasting colours, and plenty of white space. If someone scrolls past your ad in two seconds, they should still know exactly what the offer is.
Add real urgency with deadlines like “Ends Sunday midnight” or countdown timers on your site. Make it clear this won’t last forever, so they need to act now.
For video, hook them in the first three seconds and overlay the offer immediately. Don’t make them wait to find out what you’re actually selling.
Simplify everything you can. The easier it is to understand and act on, the more you’ll sell.
The best Black Friday campaigns don’t end Sunday night, they start your December and set up your entire Q1.
Use this customer spike to feed your retention engine by getting them into email flows, loyalty programs, and remarketing audiences quickly. If 30% of your Black Friday customers come back at full price in January, you didn’t just win Black Friday, you won Q1.
If you can acquire customers at breakeven knowing they’ll reorder at full margin later, you’re not overspending on acquisition, you’re investing in long-term growth. The brands that understand this can afford to be more aggressive because they’re optimising for lifetime value, not just one weekend’s revenue.
Your next 60 days of revenue start with the customers you acquire this weekend, so think long game instead of short-term wins that don’t compound.
Anyone can sell more during Black Friday. The real game is coming out richer on the other side.
Interested in learning more? Contact the Pathfinder Marketing Team !
