7 Google Ads Holiday Campaign Checks You’ll Be Glad You Made Before BFCM

After all the strategic planning that goes into your holiday campaigns, the last thing you want is to get tripped up by basics. Black Friday and Cyber Monday bring an intense, compressed wave of traffic, and even the smallest oversight can snowball into lost revenue. Below are key checks and safeguards to help ensure your Google Ads campaigns stay healthy, stable, and performing at their best during the busiest shopping days of the year.

1. Verify Conversion Tracking & Campaign Goals

Before traffic spikes, take a moment to confirm that every conversion action is functioning properly. Make sure:

A clean measurement setup ensures your bidding strategies can optimize in real time, and prevents inefficient spend when volume surges.

2. Set Up Automated Alerts

Holiday volatility can make performance fluctuate quickly. Automated alerts help you stay ahead of issues like:

Alerts give you time to address them before they cost you meaningful revenue.

3. Pre-Schedule Creative Updates

During BFCM, approval times slow down. Avoid the stress of editing ads at peak traffic by pre-scheduling:

This ensures everything goes live on time, without waiting on last-minute reviews or risking delays.

4. Review Automated Rules

If you use automated rules to switch from evergreen to sale creatives (or vice versa), double-check them to ensure:

These small adjustments help prevent the wrong ads from running during critical hours.

5. Enable Platform Notifications

Google sends important alerts about:

Make sure these notifications are turned on and going to the right inbox. During high-volume periods, a missed alert can impact your campaigns faster than usual.

6. Apply Seasonality Adjustments

Holiday conversion rates often vary by campaign type and funnel depth. Search and PMAX typically see sharper spikes in conversion rate, while top-funnel tactics like Demand Gen may follow a different pattern. If you expect short-term lifts in conversion rate, seasonality adjustments can help automated bidding adapt more efficiently instead of reacting slowly to the surge.

7. Monitor Budget Depletion

A simple but powerful custom column can give you near-instant visibility into pacing issues. Try adding:

Budget Depletion Column: Cost (Last 1 day) ÷ Daily Budget

This makes it easy to spot campaigns that are trending toward early depletion or running too hot, allowing you to adjust budgets before hitting caps.

Final Thoughts

You’ve already done the hard work of building your holiday strategy. Now it’s about protecting that investment with the right safeguards. A few thoughtful checks can be the difference between good performance and great performance during BFCM. With the right preparation, your campaigns can stay stable, responsive, and ready to capture every opportunity during the busiest weekend of the year.

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