The Black Friday Checkout Pre-Flight: 12 Checks Before You Raise Ad Spend

Black Friday is on November 27 this year. Ad costs go up in the weeks before it, because every shop bids for the same people at the same time.

That makes November the most expensive month to have a problem in your checkout. A coupon field that fails on mobile costs you a few orders in October. In late November the same fault costs you a large part of your yearly ad budget.

Do these 12 checks now, while traffic is cheap and you still have time to fix what you find.

First, write down your baseline#

You cannot tell if Black Friday went well without numbers from a normal week.

1. Record your funnel for the last four weeks. Write down the conversion rate for each step: product page to cart, cart to checkout, checkout to payment, payment to order. Do it for mobile and desktop separately. Keep the numbers where you can find them on November 27.

2. Compare three order counts. Your shop backend, your analytics, and your ad platform each count orders. Check last week's number in all three. If analytics shows many fewer orders than the backend, your tracking loses visitors, and your ad platform is bidding on part of the picture. Our post on the GA4 traffic gap explains the usual causes.

Check the page your ads point to#

3. Read the ad, then read the landing page. The promise in the ad must be the first thing the visitor sees on the page. If the ad says "40% off winter jackets" and the page opens on a general homepage, the visitor has to search for the offer. Many will not. See where visitors stop believing you for how to find the exact point where they leave.

4. Load the landing page on a mid-range phone with mobile data. Do not test on office Wi-Fi with a new laptop. Most paid social traffic arrives on phones. If the main image and the buy button take more than a few seconds to appear, you pay for visits that end before the page does.

5. Look for dead clicks and rage clicks. A dead click is a click on something that does nothing. A rage click is the same click repeated fast, by a person who expected a response. Both show you where the page confuses people. Size charts, image galleries, and color selectors are common places. Read dead clicks, rage clicks, and the revenue they hide for the patterns.

Walk through the checkout yourself#

6. Place a real order on your phone, from an ad click. Start from the ad, not from a bookmark. Use a real card. Complete the order. Then do it again on a different phone and browser. You will find things that no report shows you.

7. Test your Black Friday promo code now. Create the code early and try it in every way a customer could: lower case, upper case, with a space at the end, on a discounted item, with free shipping. A code that fails gives the visitor a reason to leave and look for a different shop.

8. Test each payment method. Card, wallet payments, buy now pay later, and any local method you offer. A payment method that fails on one browser stays hidden in your totals, because other methods still work.

9. Check the guest checkout. New customers from ads do not have an account. If the checkout asks them to create one before they can pay, expect many to stop there. Make sure the guest option is easy to see.

10. Break the form on purpose. Enter a wrong postcode. Leave a field empty. Use a phone number with spaces. The error message must say what is wrong and must keep the data the visitor already typed. A form that clears itself after an error loses the order. Our post on form abandonment has more examples.

Protect what you fixed#

11. Set a code freeze. Choose a date at least one week before Black Friday. After that date, no releases to the shop except urgent fixes. A release that looks safe can stop a checkout step without any error on screen. The release that silently killed our checkout is a full example of how this happens.

12. Decide who watches the funnel, and how often. During the peak days, somebody must look at the checkout conversion rate several times a day and compare it with the baseline from check 1. Agree on a number that means "stop the ads and investigate." It is much easier to agree on that number now than at midnight on November 27.

What to fix first#

You will probably find more problems than you can fix. Put them in this order:

1. Anything that blocks payment. No order is possible until it works.
2. Anything that fails on mobile only. Most of your paid traffic is there.
3. Promo code problems. They affect your most motivated visitors.
4. Message match between the ad and the page.
5. Speed.

For a structured way to go through the whole funnel, use our checkout abandonment analysis. It takes about 15 minutes.

After the checks#

Run the list again one week before Black Friday. Things change in seven weeks: a plugin updates, a payment provider changes a form, a new banner covers a button.

With GrainQL you do not have to find these by hand. Kai reads the sessions, heatmaps, and funnels on your shop and reports what is broken, with the sessions that show it. You can also ask a direct question, for example: "Where do paid mobile visitors stop in checkout this week?"