How to track competitor Black Friday ads

Black Friday lands on 27 November this year, and if you wait until sale week to look at what rivals are running, you'll be reacting to a campaign they built in September. This guide shows you how to track competitors' Black Friday ads using the free ad libraries, what to record, and — from the 50,982 UK ads we've AI-qualified across 158 brands — what the data says about when brands launch, how deep real discounts go, and the one signal that reliably separates a genuine Black Friday push from recycled sale copy.

When do competitors launch Black Friday ads? Earlier than you think

The single most useful thing our data shows about Black Friday timing: October, not November, was the biggest launch month last season. Of the Black Friday-themed creatives in our library with a Google first-shown date in the autumn 2025 window, 67 first appeared in October against 38 in November, and another 27 were already running in September. In total, 132 Black Friday creatives went live across September–November 2025.

That matches how media buying actually works. Creative gets tested in the weeks before the event — hooks, formats, audiences — so the proven variants can take the real budget during sale week. By the time 27 November arrives, the interesting decisions have already been made and are sitting in the ad libraries for anyone to read. The practical consequence: start your sweep in October. The ads you catch now are the test phase, and the ones that are still running in mid-November are the winners.

Last year's Black Friday ads kept running for months — study them first

Here's the finding that surprised us most. We track 300 ads our qualification model tags with a Black Friday seasonal theme, and 298 of them first appeared before December 2025 and were still being reported as running well into 2026. Of the 132 that launched inside the autumn 2025 Black Friday window specifically, the median went on being reported as running for 276 days after its first-shown date. These aren't early campaigns for the next event; they're last season's creative that was simply never switched off.

Those creatives surfaced through Google's Ads Transparency Center and Meta's library, both of which report first-shown and last-shown dates, so long-running creative stays visible and datable. Two lessons fall out of this:

• You can read last year's playbook today, free. Before this year's campaigns drop, you can see exactly which Black Friday creatives your rivals found worth leaving on: the hooks, the discounts, the formats. What a brand chose to keep running tells you what it had already decided was worth repeating — though don't read long run-length as proof of performance on its own, since dormant and unprofitable creative can sit in an account untouched just as easily.
• "Black Friday" is becoming an always-on frame for some brands. Simba accounts for 47 of those long-running Black Friday creatives on its own (median 276 days between first and last shown) — the mattress sector's permanent-sale culture wearing a seasonal costume. Pets at Home (32), ASOS (27), DFS (18), Wayfair (17) and B&Q (17) follow. If a competitor's "Black Friday deal" has been running since last November, their 2026 "event" is marketing theatre — useful to know before you panic-match their pricing.

The free method: sweeping the ad libraries for Black Friday creative

Every major platform now publishes its ads. The sweep is the same one we recommend for tracking competitor promotions generally, with a seasonal twist: between now and sale week, weekly is the minimum cadence, and from mid-November you want to check every two or three days, because Black Friday creative turns over fast.

1. Meta Ad Library first. Search the competitor's Page, filter to the UK, sort newest first. Meta is where Black Friday creative gets tested cheapest and earliest. New ad sets appearing in clusters — five or ten creatives with the same start date — are the tell that a campaign just launched. Our Meta Ad Library guide covers the filters and their blind spots.
2. Google Ads Transparency Center second. This catches Search, Shopping and YouTube — where budget goes once a brand commits. It's also the only library with multi-year date ranges, which is how you check whether that "Black Friday" ad is new or a 400-day veteran. One caveat for big advertisers: the interface stops paginating at roughly 900 creatives, so you are never seeing a large brand's full account — we've documented this in our Transparency Center guide.
3. TikTok's Commercial Content Library if your category skews younger — details in our TikTok ad library guide. For B2B brands running year-end offers, the LinkedIn Ad Library is the equivalent sweep.

What to record for Black Friday specifically

The general promo-tracking fields (offer type, depth, code, deadline, conditions, dates) all apply, but Black Friday adds three that matter:

• The pre-event baseline. Record each competitor's standard offer now, in October. A "40% off" Black Friday ad from a brand whose everyday ads say 30% is a 10-point event. Without the October baseline you can't tell a real markdown from a relabel.
• Launch date of the first explicitly Black Friday creative. This is the strategic signal — it tells you next year's calendar, not just this year's.
• What they switch off. Brands clear the decks for sale week. If the evergreen brand campaign disappears in mid-November, the Black Friday budget just arrived.

How deep do Black Friday discounts actually go?

UK shoppers were forecast to spend £6.4bn over Black Friday 2025, per PwC, so the pressure to look competitive on depth is real. But the ads themselves are less dramatic than the "70% OFF EVERYTHING" folklore suggests. Across the 6,285 live UK ads in our library with a recorded discount percentage:

The median recorded discount is 25%, and the 20–29% band is the most crowded by a distance. Ads our model tags as Black Friday-themed run slightly deeper — a median of 30% across the 145 with a figure recorded — but "slightly deeper than normal" is the honest summary, not "half price everything". The 50%+ band is dominated by two things worth discounting (so to speak) when you read a rival's creative: "up to" ceilings that apply to thin clearance stock, and intro offers from subscription brands where the percentage describes the first order only. Record the conditions, not just the number.

Also worth knowing: 875 of the qualified ads in our library display a promo code in the creative (as at 3 November 2026). Codes spike around Black Friday, and they're one of the most useful things to log — a code tells you which channel and audience an offer targets, and whether the "exclusive" deal in their email is the same one running to cold audiences on Meta.

Urgency is the real Black Friday tell

Our qualification scores every ad for urgency signalling — countdowns, deadlines, stock warnings — on a 0–100 scale. The averages are unambiguous:

Urgency, not discount depth, is what makes a Black Friday ad a Black Friday ad: the themed creative averages 72 on our 0–100 urgency scale against 24.9 across all 50,982 qualified ads, close to three times the library average. Which is exactly why it's the signal to scrutinise — a deadline that kept being reported as running for 276 days after it first appeared is a template, not an event. When you sweep, note whether the urgency is dated ("ends 1 December") or vague ("don't miss out"). Dated urgency from a brand that rarely uses it means a genuine, budgeted event. Vague urgency from a brand that uses it year-round means nothing at all.

A simple schedule from now to 27 November

• Now (late October): pick 3–5 competitors, record their baseline offers, and note any Black Friday creative already live — last season's survivors included. One hour.
• Weekly through early November: sweep Meta and Google for each competitor. Log new creatives, launch dates, stated offers. Thirty minutes a week.
• From 17 November: move to every 2–3 days. Watch for evergreen campaigns switching off and creative clusters launching.
• Sale week (24–30 November): daily check on depth and deadlines. This is when you compare their live ads against the October baseline before making any pricing response.
• December: one final sweep to see what stays on. That's next year's intelligence.

Caveats: our figures describe ads, not sales — an offer-heavy account can be a deliberate acquisition strategy or a margin problem, and the ad data can't tell you which. Seasonal themes are assigned by our qualification model from the creative itself, so counts are estimates, not a census. And the platform libraries show what's running, not what's spent.

When the manual sweep breaks

The free method genuinely works for a handful of competitors — until sale season, which is precisely when it breaks. Creative volume triples, offers live inside image and video creative where keyword searches can't see them, and the 48-hour flash deal launches and dies between your sweeps.

That's the gap AdRival covers. We capture ads for 164 UK brands across Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn, and AI-qualify each creative we capture on Google, Meta and TikTok — offer type, discount percentage, promo code, deadline, urgency score and seasonal theme extracted from the actual creative, including text baked into images. The numbers in this guide came straight from that data, and you can browse the live picture for any covered brand free on our brand ad libraries — LookFantastic and Dunelm are good seasonal examples — before deciding whether the manual route covers your needs.

Either way, open the spreadsheet this week. Every Black Friday ad your competitors will run in sale week is being rehearsed in the libraries right now. The only question is whether you're watching.