Short answer: before Black Friday, do five checks: do your sales reach Google Ads, Meta and GA4, does your cookie banner do its job, are there no duplicate or missing purchases, is your seasonality adjustment ready and who keeps an eye on it during the sale. It takes half an hour. If a platform misses sales, it moves your budget the wrong way in the busiest week of the year.
Why this has to happen before Black Friday
Around Black Friday a lot of budget is spent in a short time. Google Ads and Meta distribute that budget based on the sales they see. If part of the sales is missing, the platform thinks a campaign is doing worse than it is, and moves budget the wrong way. That costs money at the moment there is the most to gain.
A mistake you find now costs half an hour. The same mistake in Black Friday week costs a week of badly spent budget.
Check 1: do your sales arrive?
Place a test order, or look at yesterday’s orders.
Google Ads: go to Goals › Conversions and check that the purchase action shows Recording conversions.
Meta: open Events Manager and check that the
Purchaseevent comes in today, with a value.GA4: check in Realtime or DebugView that
purchasecomes in.Compare the count with the number of orders in the store for the same days.
Check 2: does your cookie banner do its job?
Open the site in a private window, decline all cookies and place an order or click through the route. Use Tag Assistant to see whether the ad tags respect that choice. Then accept and check that the tags do fire. If this goes wrong, you measure too little, or more than you are allowed to. More in Consent Mode v2 in GTM.
Check 3: no duplicate or missing sales
Refresh the thank-you page after a test order. Does the purchase come in twice? Then the account will report too much revenue.
Does every purchase have an order number (
transaction_id) in GA4 and the sameevent_idin the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API? That is how the platforms filter out duplicates.Are value and currency sent along? A purchase without a value still counts, but revenue stays at zero.
Check 4: prepare a seasonality adjustment
If you use Smart Bidding in Google Ads, set up a seasonality adjustment for the days of the promotion. The system then knows the conversion rate will be higher for a while, and doesn’t overreact to the drop afterwards. Google recommends it for short periods of a few days.
Check 5: who keeps an eye on it during the sale?
Agree who puts store sales next to Google Ads and Meta every morning of Black Friday week. If a platform suddenly goes quiet while the store keeps selling, you want to know that day, not after the weekend. Monitoring sends you an alert automatically; see monitoring tracking across clients.
How to go about it
Do the five checks by the week of 16 November at the latest.
Note for each check: fine, or what is wrong.
Fix mistakes and test again with an order.
Then leave the tracking alone until after Cyber Monday (30 November).
After the sale, put the numbers side by side: store, GA4, Google Ads and Meta.
Want to look deeper into the container? Use the 30-minute GTM audit.
TrackLead makes sure sales and leads reach Google, Meta and LinkedIn properly, and tells you when something breaks. Take a look at tracklead.eu.
Frequently asked questions
When is Black Friday 2026?
On Friday 27 November 2026. Many stores start their deals the week before, so do the checks by the week of 16 November at the latest.
Can I still change the tracking in Black Friday week?
Better not. Any change can break something at the moment the most money is at stake. Do the checks beforehand and only change something if you find a mistake.
What is a seasonality adjustment in Google Ads?
A setting that tells Smart Bidding you expect a higher or lower conversion rate for a short period. Google recommends it for short promotions of a few days, such as Black Friday.
What if the numbers don’t add up after Black Friday?
Put the number of orders from the store next to GA4, Google Ads and Meta. A small gap is normal, a large one points to a tracking problem. After Black Friday we publish a blog that walks through that comparison.