Sales Season Prep: Site, Feed and Campaigns

1. The preparation calendar

The principle is simple: whatever can break will break at the peak. So technical changes, new campaigns and bid strategy switches all happen before the season, not during it.

2. Will the site hold up

The most expensive failure of the season is traffic arriving at a site that doesn’t work. What to check in advance:

• load. A 5–10x spike over normal traffic is ordinary for Black Friday. Ask your hosting about limits ahead of time and warn them about the expected volume;
• speed. Core Web Vitals benchmarks: LCP under 2.5 s, INP under 200 ms, CLS under 0.1. Test on mobile, and specifically on the templates your ads will point to;
• cart and checkout. Walk the buyer’s path yourself on a phone, from product page to payment. Check forms, promo codes and delivery options separately;
• stock and prices. An out-of-stock product eats budget at the peak and damages trust;
• the delivery page. In season this is the main objection: will the order arrive before the holidays;
• indexing of promo pages. Check that last year’s sale pages are not noindexed and don’t return 404 — details on improving indexing.

The rule: finish all template and checkout changes before the season starts. Rebuilding a cart in November is the worst idea available.

3. Feed and Merchant Center

Shopping campaigns bring most of the season’s revenue, and what stops them is rarely bidding — it is the feed and the review process.

• prices and availability. Feed prices must match the site. During a sale they change often, so the feed needs to update several times a day or via automatic fetching;
• sale prices belong in their own field rather than overwriting the base price — that is how the struck-through original price appears in results;
• review times. Approvals take longer in November than usual. Finish any structural change to the feed or the site in October;
• suspension risk. The usual reasons have nothing to do with products: price mismatches, missing return conditions, incomplete contact details;
• feed rules. If titles or categories need a bulk fix, do it with feed rules rather than by hand.

Check the specific products you plan to push in season: are they all active in Merchant Center, and are there disapprovals in exactly those categories? Shopping and Performance Max setup is part of our Google Shopping and Performance Max services.

4. Which campaigns to prepare in advance

Don’t launch a new campaign on day one of a sale: it will spend the peak on learning. Allow three to four weeks.

Practical notes:

• separate campaigns or ad groups for promotional products are easier to switch off afterwards than promotional messaging is to strip out of your main ones;
• prepare ads with the dates and terms of the offer in advance, together with a plan for when they go live and when they come down;
• keep the same sale page year after year rather than creating a new one — it accumulates links and signals.

How we build campaign structure is described on our Google Ads setup page.

5. Bidding: what not to touch at the peak

The main rule of the season: don’t change the bid strategy once traffic is flowing. Any change to a strategy’s settings restarts learning, and that takes up to around 50 conversions or 3 conversion cycles. At the peak, that means spending your most expensive days on calibration.

What you can and should do:

• seasonality adjustments. If you expect conversion rates to change substantially, set the period and the expected change in advance in the bid strategy’s advanced controls. Google recommends them for short events of 1–7 days and advises against using them for more than 14 days at a time. This is a tool for a sale, not for the whole of November;
• data exclusions. If tracking broke or a few days produced anomalous data, exclude them so the strategy doesn’t learn from junk;
• review targets before the season. Since 17 August 2026, budget-limited campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS stay closer to the stated target instead of overperforming it. If your target was set with headroom, the season will behave differently than it used to — check targets before the start, not during.

More on the strategies themselves and on the learning period: Google Ads bidding strategies.

6. Budgets and the auction

In season, competitors’ bids and conversion rates rise at the same time. What that means:

• cost per click goes up — often 1.5–2x the usual. That is fine as long as conversion rates rise with it; judge by cost per key event, not by CPC;
• budget-limited campaigns lose the most at the peak: these are exactly the days when there is demand you failed to buy. If you have money to add somewhere, add it where the status says "limited by budget";
• daily budgets can be exceeded by up to double on a given day, with the system balancing it out across the month. In a short sale that usually works in your favour;
• have a plan for the sale days in advance: how much you are willing to spend per day, when you raise budgets, when you stop. Friday evening is a bad time to be deciding.

One caveat: multiplying a daily budget several times over in the middle of the season is also a change the system doesn’t absorb instantly. Raise budgets gradually in the days before the start.

7. Audiences you have to build in advance

The cheapest sales of the season come from people who have already visited the site. But lists don’t appear on sale day — they accumulate over months.

• remarketing lists by product views, cart abandonment and past purchases;
• dynamic remarketing with a feed: it brings people back to the exact product they looked at. For the season, this is the core format;
• Customer Match — uploaded customer contacts. Requires consent and a clean list;
• Lookalike segments in Demand Gen — what replaced the similar audiences Google removed in 2023. Note that since March 2026 the reach setting (narrow, balanced, broad) works as a signal for the algorithm rather than a hard similarity limit, so seed list quality is now the main lever you control;
• exclusion lists: existing customers, returns, wholesale buyers. These are the ones most often forgotten in season.

8. Analytics: what to measure

The season is the one period when decisions are made daily, so the data has to be in order before it starts:

• key events configured, not duplicated, and passing value — analytics setup is part of our web analytics service;
• every non-organic link tagged: emails, banners, influencers, messengers. Otherwise half your sales land in Direct;
• comparison set against last season rather than last week — in November, week over week tells you nothing;
• a channel breakdown: what produced sales and what only produced traffic;
• daily monitoring of simple things: disapproved products in the feed, campaign statuses, stock levels, site speed.

Finish interface and landing page tests before the season. Peak traffic produces results fast, but a change made at that moment risks losing sales, not only gaining them.

9. After the season

January is part of the season, not a pause:

• remove seasonality adjustments and promotional messaging, restore normal targets and budgets;
• don’t switch remarketing off straight away: some purchases slip into early January, and gift cards and returns bring people back;
• the audiences you gathered are the season’s most valuable asset — they become the lists and seed lists for the next campaigns;
• record results by category and product rather than in aggregate: next season that is a ready-made plan for where the budget goes;
• keep the sale page, stripped of dates and prices — by next year it will have accumulated signals and links.