Black Friday Product Feed Checklist (2026)

Black Friday ads are only as good as the product feed behind them. Google Shopping, Performance Max and Meta catalogue ads all read prices, stock and images from your feed. When the feed is wrong at peak, products get disapproved or show the wrong price, and fixes take time to go through.

This checklist covers the feed itself. For the ads side, see our Black Friday 2026 catalogue ads plan.

1. Put sale prices in sale_price, not price

Keep the full price in price and put the reduced price in sale_price. Google’s help centre asks for exactly this. It is how Google knows the product is discounted and can show the original price next to the sale price.

Two rules to check against your store:

The sale price in the feed must match the price on the landing page and at checkout.
The landing page should show both prices, with only the sale price at checkout.

If your discounts only appear in the basket, or through a code, read Google’s rules on coupon codes carefully. A feed that says £40 while the product page says £50 is a price mismatch.

2. Schedule the sale with sale_price_effective_date

sale_price_effective_date starts and ends the sale for you. Without it, a sale price applies as soon as the feed is processed.

The format is a start and end in ISO 8601, separated by a slash:

2026-11-27T00:00Z/2026-11-30T23:59Z

Include a time zone on both dates. Google uses UTC if you leave it out, which matters if your sale starts at midnight UK time in summer, or midnight in New York. In November, UK time is the same as UTC.

The end date is the part people forget. A sale price that keeps running into December is a price mismatch waiting to happen.

3. Refresh the feed more often during the sale

Prices and stock change fastest in sale week. If your feed refreshes once a day, a price change at 9am may not reach Google or Meta until the next morning.

Check how often each channel fetches your feed, and how often your feed tool rebuilds it.
Increase both for the sale if you can.
After a big price change on the site, trigger a refresh rather than waiting.

4. Keep availability honest

Advertising a product that has sold out wastes spend and frustrates shoppers. Make sure availability follows stock closely, and that products return to in_stock when you restock. On Meta, stale availability is a common cause of out-of-stock mismatches.

If you’re taking pre-orders or back-orders for the sale, use preorder or backorder with an availability_date instead of in_stock.

5. Check every image, especially new products

New sale lines added in a hurry are where image problems appear.

Broken links. A product whose image URL returns an error can’t run. See broken image links in Merchant Center.
Too small. Platforms set minimum sizes. See images that are too small.
Promotional overlays on Google. Google’s image rules say the main image must not include promotional text, watermarks or borders. A “30% off” badge belongs in your ad creative or in Meta catalogue images, not in a Google Shopping image_link. See promotional overlays in Merchant Center.

6. Tag sale products with a custom label

A custom label such as bfcm_2026 lets you build Black Friday product groups in Google Ads and product sets on Meta in one step, and remove them in one step afterwards. Use a label slot you’re not already using for something else.

7. Get shipping and delivery times right

Shoppers buying gifts care about delivery dates. Make sure your shipping settings, handling times and transit times reflect what you can really deliver in peak week, when carriers are slower. It also matters for the Christmas cut-off dates that follow straight after.

8. Fix titles before you spend

At Black Friday more people search for specific products. Titles that say what the product is, with brand, product type and key attributes such as colour and size, match more of those searches. If titles are thin, AI Product Optimisation can rewrite them across the catalogue, and you review the changes before they go live.

9. Run a full audit a week before the sale

Leave time to fix what you find. Our Feed Audit checks your products against Google and Meta requirements and lists the issues by product, so you can clear rejections before the busiest week of the year.

The checklist

Frequently asked questions

What format does sale_price_effective_date use?

Google Merchant Center takes a start and end in ISO 8601, separated by a slash, for example 2026-11-27T00:00Z/2026-11-30T23:59Z. Include a time zone on each date. If you leave the time zone out, Google uses UTC.

Should I replace price with the sale price for Black Friday?

No. Google asks you to keep submitting the full price in price and put the reduced price in sale_price. That lets it show the original price alongside the sale price when the requirements are met.

Why do products get disapproved during sales?

Most often because the price or availability in the feed no longer matches the landing page, usually because prices changed on the site before the feed refreshed. Broken or newly added images are the other common cause.

Black Friday product feed checklist: sale prices, stock and approvals