Black Friday & Christmas: The Google Ads Guide

Black Friday and Christmas are the biggest sales events of the year. For most online stores, these few weeks decide how the year ends.

There are a lot of ways to approach them, though. Discount or no discount, a separate campaign or not, adjust your bids or leave them alone. For many advertisers, it’s a confusing stretch, because there’s no single right answer.

This post is a decision guide. It walks through the options you have, the thinking behind each one, and how to turn that into a strategy that fits your store.

What makes days like Black Friday and Christmas different?

Two things set Black Friday and the weeks before Christmas apart: more buyers and more competition. More people are searching for products, and many of them are seeing your store for the first time. At the same time, more stores are competing for the same searches.

For Google Ads, that means more search volume, more competitors in the auction, and higher click prices. Because shoppers arrive ready to buy, conversion rates go up too. A more expensive click can still pay off.

Shoppers also compare more than usual. They have several stores open in different tabs, and every one of them is showing a deal.

A store with no visible offer doesn’t stand out. Neither does a 5 or 10 percent discount.

There’s one more effect that throws a lot of people off. In the weeks before Black Week, performance often looks weaker than normal. Many shoppers have already made up their minds and are waiting for the deals before they buy.

Those clicks aren’t wasted. Some of those shoppers convert during Black Week, the moment your offer goes live. If you judge the run-up weeks too harshly and cut budgets, you give up Black Week revenue those weeks were building toward.

Is it worth participating?

For most stores, it’s worth participating. Black Friday is the highest-revenue day of the year for many, and December is the highest-revenue month. A lot of shoppers see your store for the first time during this period.

Participating doesn’t automatically mean discounting. Even if you only want to ride the higher demand, you should prepare for it.

Every household has a holiday budget. Money spent in early November won’t be there for Black Friday. That’s why it pays to be visible in the weeks before.

What do you need to think through beforehand?

Three things need to be settled up front: your goal, your offer, and your timing. Everything that happens in the account later follows from these.

The goal

The first question is what you want the promotion to achieve. Three goals come up most often:

• Maximum revenue. Capture the surge in demand in full, even if profit per order is smaller.
• New customers. Use the promotion as a way in, so shoppers get to know your store and come back later.
• Clearing inventory. Sell through stock that needs to make room for the next season.

The goal determines which offer fits and how much it can cost you. A store chasing new customers needs a different offer than one clearing out leftover stock.

The offer

During these days, almost every store is running a promotion. A 5 or 10 percent discount barely moves anyone in that noise. Conversion rates don’t rise noticeably, but the margin is gone anyway.

An offer that works has to give the customer a clear advantage. And that advantage has to fit in a single line, so it lands in the ad.

The common offer formats:

Treat the list as a starting point. It’s often worth coming up with a format of your own that fits your catalog and that competitors don’t have. Shopify has a list of 23 Black Friday promotion ideas if you want more inspiration.

The timing

The third question is when your offers run. The classic dates are Black Week, Black Friday, Cyber Monday on the following Monday, and the weeks up to the last order date before Christmas.

You can stick to these dates or set your own. Starting earlier reaches shoppers before competitors get going. Ending later catches the stragglers.

What matters is a clear end date. The deadline is a real reason to buy, because everyone knows the offer will be gone afterward.

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What are your options in Google Ads?

Once the offer is set, the job is to make it visible in the right places. Google Ads gives you several ways to do that. None of them is mandatory, and you don’t have to use all of them.

For the basics on campaign types and account structure, see the guide to Google Ads for ecommerce.

Relevance is what counts: the right message at the right moment. If you’re running the same ad on Black Friday that you ran in October, it gets lost next to your competitors’ promotional ads.

Promotion assets and other assets

The promotion asset is one of the most important elements for search ads on sale days. It appears as its own line under the ad, with an occasion like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas, plus the discount or promo code. Google reviews it before approval, so set it up several days ahead of the sale.

Depending on your offer, you can add:

• Sitelinks to sale pages or gift categories.
• Callouts for shipping, delivery time, or an extended return window.
• Countdown in the headline. A placeholder in the ad copy counts down the days or hours until the sale ends.

Every asset gets a start and end date. That way, nothing that no longer applies keeps running after the sale.

Dedicated ads and ad copy

In search ads, the offer belongs in the first headline. During promotions, you can pin that headline so it shows in every combination. The rest of the ad stays the same: brand, product, and benefit.

For Performance Max and Demand Gen, this applies to copy and images. Two approaches are common:

• A promo overlay on your existing images. Enough if the campaign has barely been serving on Display and YouTube.
• Dedicated promo creatives. Worth it if Display, YouTube, or Demand Gen drive a meaningful share of revenue.

The landing page is part of this. Whatever the ad promises has to be visible on the page right away. Otherwise the visitor bounces.

Merchant Center: sale price, promotions, and delivery times

In Shopping ads, Google shows a strikethrough price when a sale price is set in the feed and the regular price was in effect long enough beforehand. A price raised just before the sale won’t get a strikethrough.

For promo codes, free gifts, and shipping deals, there are Merchant Promotions. They add a promotion badge under the product. For how to set them up, see the post on Merchant Center promotions.

Before Christmas, delivery time matters. In Merchant Center, you can set shipping times and the last order date.

Google then shows an estimated delivery date in the ad. The shopper sees whether the package will arrive before Christmas.

Campaign structure: separate campaign or not?

There’s no blanket answer to whether your sale items should get their own campaign. It depends on how much extra control you need during this period.

Arguments for:

• A dedicated budget and target for the sale items.
• A seasonality adjustment that applies only to these products.
• Your running campaigns stay untouched. Andrew Lolk of Savvy Revenue recommends this when only part of the catalog is on sale, and suggests moving the smaller group of products.

Arguments against:

• A new campaign starts with no history and usually needs one to two weeks before bidding settles in.
• If you launch it on the day of the sale, you’re giving away the best hours.

The middle ground: a dedicated asset group inside your existing Performance Max campaign. It holds the promo copy, the promo images, and the sale items as its product selection. The other asset groups stay as they are.

My recommendation: a separate campaign or asset group is worth it when you need an extra level of control. For example, for products you specifically want to clear out, or for sale items that need a different bid target. Otherwise, keep the promotion inside your existing campaigns, with promotion assets and promo copy.

If you do set up a separate campaign, launch it at least two weeks before the sale day. And keep in mind that the learning phase won’t run under ideal conditions during this period.

Remarketing and Demand Gen: warm up early, close at the right moment

Search and Shopping reach people who are searching right now. Remarketing and Demand Gen reach people who already know your store, or whom you’ve introduced to the brand beforehand. During the sale period, the two work together.

In the weeks before: Demand Gen shows images and videos on YouTube, Discover, and in Gmail. That’s how you build brand awareness before Black Week starts. Every visitor who lands on your site along the way ends up in a remarketing list.

Those lists start filling up on their own in October: visitors from the past few weeks, buyers from last Black Friday, and everyone who left a cart behind.

On the sale days: These people already know your store. Remarketing shows them the offer the moment it goes live. This is where the preparation pays off, because someone who’s ready to buy sees a deal from a brand they already recognize.

That can be a dedicated remarketing campaign with promo creatives, or an extra push with a higher budget in the existing campaign. In Demand Gen, you can set your remarketing lists directly as the audience.

What are your bidding options, and when does each one fit?

You have four bidding options on sale days. Some context first: with a bid strategy like target ROAS, you set how much revenue you expect per dollar of ad spend. Google then calculates a bid for every auction, based on data from the past few weeks.

When conversion rates jump on sale days, that calculation lags behind. Bids end up too low for the demand that’s actually there. The four options each handle this differently.

Option 1: Leave bidding alone, just protect the budget

According to Google’s help docs, automated bidding already accounts for well-known events like Black Friday.

• Fits when the sale mostly brings more search volume and conversion rates stay roughly the same.
• Watch out for: the budget capping the campaign.

Option 2: Loosen the target over several weeks

A lower target ROAS allows higher bids. The campaign enters more auctions and spends more.

• Fits when demand rises over a period of weeks, like the whole of December.
• How much: my recommendation is 10 to 20 percent below the value the account normally hits during the season. A bigger step triggers a new learning phase.
• Afterward: once the season is over, move the target back up.

Option 3: A seasonality adjustment for 1 to 7 days

The seasonality adjustment is a setting under “Tools,” “Budgets and bidding,” “Adjustments.” You define a date range and enter the percentage by which you expect conversion rates to rise during that window.

Google factors in that expectation and bids higher for the duration of the window. Afterward, normal bidding resumes.

• Fits when you’re facing a short event with a much higher conversion rate, meaning Black Friday or Cyber Monday specifically. Google advises against using it for more than 14 days.
• How much: you can derive the percentage from last year. If the conversion rate on Black Friday was double what it was in the weeks before, that’s 100 percent. If you don’t have last year’s data, start conservatively, because click prices rise in the same proportion.
• Where: the adjustment can be set for the whole account or for individual campaigns.

Option 4: Raise the daily budget

The daily budget caps what the campaign can spend in a day. If it’s too low on the sale day, the campaign pauses even though the demand is there.

• For Search and Shopping, the budget on the sale day can be considerably higher than usual, because the demand will actually absorb it.
• For Performance Max, raise it in steps, because a big jump can shift spend into Display and YouTube.

How do you know it’s working on the day?

On the sale days, click price and budget tell you whether things are working. ROAS and conversions aren’t meaningful yet on those days, because some purchases only get recorded days after the click.

Three metrics make sense:

• Click price. Reacts immediately and shows how strong the competition is.
• Search lost impression share due to budget. If it rises, the budget is capping the campaign.
• Auction insights compared to last year. Are the same competitors bidding more, or are there new ones?

What to leave alone on the sale day: targets, campaigns in the learning phase, and product exclusions. Any change made that day only takes effect once the day is over.

What do you do after the sale?

After the sale, you reset your settings and take care of the new customers. The sale ends on its date. They don’t switch off by themselves.

• Promotion assets, sale prices, and promotions expire on their end dates. Double-check anyway that everything’s actually off.
• Targets and budgets go back to where they were.
• Add a data exclusion for the sale days so they don’t become the new normal in your bidding data.
• The new customers from the sale. Anyone who only bought because of the discount won’t come back until the next discount unless you give them a reason. For how to separate new customers in the account, see the post on new vs. returning customers.
• Returns after the sale. Whatever comes back should be corrected in the account too. See conversion adjustments.

Notes for next year are part of the job: which promotion, which settings, what worked. Those notes are the foundation for next fall’s preparation.

FAQ: Common questions about Black Friday and Christmas in Google Ads

Conclusion

Black Friday and Christmas are the most important time of the year for most online stores. In Google Ads, there’s no fixed playbook for it. Goal and offer first, then visibility in the account, then bidding.

Every option in this post is one you can use or skip. What matters is that you know what’s available and when each one fits. Then you’ll find the strategy that suits your store.

Thanks for reading all the way through, and good luck with the holiday season.

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