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

Every PPC manager has lived it: the caffeine-fueled hours of prepping campaigns, polishing ad copy, and building promo extensions before Black Friday hits. You’ve mapped out budgets, tested creative, and lined up automations to make sure everything runs smoothly.

Then, Friday morning arrives. Traffic spikes. Conversions start climbing until one of your top-performing campaigns suddenly stops tracking. You hit refresh, thinking it’s a glitch. Then another refresh. The sinking feeling sets in.

The culprit? A single conversion tag that broke after a landing page update.

Most holiday campaign issues don’t come from bad strategy. They come from small, preventable misses that slip through when teams are rushing to meet deadlines. Before your Google Ads campaigns go live for Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM), spend an hour going through these checks. They’re simple, but they can protect your performance when traffic and competition reach their peak.

1. Verify Conversion Tracking and Campaign Goals

If Google Ads had a heartbeat, it would be conversion tracking. When tracking fails, every bid, automation, and optimization starts flying blind.

Take time to confirm your data is clean and your goals still match your business objectives. 

✅ Double-check that:

If you are running both account-level and campaign-specific goals, make sure each campaign is tied to the correct outcome. A Performance Max campaign focused on purchases should not be pulling in lead-form conversions meant for another initiative.

Pro tip: Create a test conversion before launch weekend. You would be surprised how often tags get broken after last-minute edits or cross-team updates.

2. Set Up Automated Alerts Before You Need Them

Imagine this: It’s Cyber Monday, your campaigns are performing well, and you step away for a quick coffee. When you return, one of your best ad groups has served zero impressions for hours.

That’s exactly the scenario automated alerts are meant to prevent.

Set up alerts to flag sudden drops in ROAS, zero conversions, or a sharp decline in impressions. You’ll be notified the moment something changes, giving you time to fix it before it affects your bottom line.

Automation does not replace oversight. It helps you react faster when something goes off course.

3. Schedule Creative Updates Early

If you’ve ever waited for ad approvals the week of Black Friday, you know the frustration. Google’s review queues slow down during peak periods, and same-day edits often get stuck in limbo.

Avoid the chaos by scheduling your creative updates several days ahead of time. Make sure ad copy, sitelinks, and promo extensions are approved before your sale begins.

Pro tip: Submit new creatives as “additional assets” instead of editing existing ones. This lets you switch live ads instantly once they are approved, without risking disapprovals mid-promotion.

4. Review Automated Rules

Automated rules are powerful, but they are not perfect. A single error can leave your evergreen ads live during your sale or pause a high-performing campaign at the worst time.

Review all your rules carefully:

Think of automated rules as interns. They can do the work, but they need clear instructions.

5. Enable Platform Notifications

Picture this: your best-selling product feed gets disapproved, and you don’t see the alert until Monday morning. The cost of that delay can be massive.

Go into your Google Ads settings and make sure you are receiving notifications by email. These include alerts for ad disapprovals, feed issues, or billing problems.

A few minutes of setup can save you from a weekend of lost revenue.

6. Apply Seasonality Adjustments

Holiday traffic behaves differently. Conversion rates climb, competition intensifies, and automated bidding often struggles to keep up.

This is where seasonality adjustments come in. They help your bidding strategies anticipate short-term spikes in conversion rates.

For example:

Apply tailored seasonality adjustments to each campaign type. This ensures your bids remain aggressive enough to capture volume but still efficient once demand normalizes.

Pro tip: Use historical data from the same period last year as your baseline. Even small patterns in time-of-day or day-of-week performance can make a measurable difference.

7. Monitor Budget Depletion

Budgets move faster than expected during the holidays. One overlooked metric can stop your strongest campaigns from serving in the middle of peak shopping hours.

Add a Budget Depletion custom column to your dashboard.

Formula: Cost (Last 1 day) ÷ Daily Budget

This metric quickly highlights which campaigns are approaching or exceeding their daily limits. Keep an eye on high-spend performers and be ready to reallocate budget throughout the day.

If you are managing multiple accounts, consider creating a shared budget dashboard or using scripts to send hourly updates. It’s one of the easiest ways to maintain control during high-velocity traffic periods.

Bonus: Check Your Ad Extensions and Feed Integrations

Beyond the core campaign checks, review your feed integrations and ad extensions before traffic spikes. If your product feed is outdated or your promotion extensions expire early, you risk wasting valuable impressions.

These smaller updates can have a measurable impact on click-through rate and ad relevance, especially during price-sensitive shopping weekends.

Final Takeaway

You’ve already done the hard part: planning your offers, building your creative, and forecasting your spend. Now it’s about protecting that work.

Every year, brands lose thousands in revenue because of preventable issues that surface only once campaigns are live. A few thoughtful checks today can save you a weekend of panic and lost conversions.

Think of this checklist as your pre-flight inspection. The engines are built, the route is mapped, and the passengers are boarding. You just need to make sure the landing gear is locked in place before takeoff.

Here’s to clean tracking, smart bidding, smooth delivery, and your strongest BFCM performance yet.

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