Google Ads holiday campaign: when to launch and what budget

Many small businesses launch a holiday campaign on the morning of Black Friday and switch it off only on Christmas Eve. They lose money at both ends. At the start the campaign has no purchase data yet, so Google’s algorithm learns during the days of the highest traffic and competition. At the end you pay for clicks from people who already know the parcel won’t arrive before Christmas.

Below you will find the calendar of the 2026 season, a way to set the budget, the rules for seasonality adjustments and the changes in DSA campaigns. As of 28 October 2026.

The 2026 season calendar: the dates that set the campaign

The last dispatch date with a delivery guarantee before Christmas Eve is announced by carriers, usually in December. In 2024 and 2025, InPost gave 22 December, 13:00 (for Paczkomat parcel lockers). Check the 2026 deadline in your carrier’s December announcement and add time for packing orders. How to prepare the store itself, that is, the lowest price from the last 30 days, the feed and the emails, I describe in the Black Friday plan for a small online store.

When to start: in early November at the latest

Smart Bidding (e.g. maximize conversions or target ROAS) learns from conversions. According to Google’s help on the learning period, adjusting the strategy to a new goal can take up to 50 conversions or 3 conversion cycles. A conversion cycle is the time from clicking an ad to a purchase.

An example: if your ads bring 2 orders a day, you will collect 50 conversions in about 25 days. A campaign launched on 27 Nov would therefore be learning for almost the entire season. That is why:

• launch a new campaign in early November at the latest,
• in an existing campaign don’t change the bidding strategy in November, because changing its settings also restarts learning,
• from around 20 Nov change only the budget, the ad copy and the promotion assets.

Before launch, check three things:

1. Purchase tracking. Place a test order and check that the conversion appeared in Google Ads and GA4 with the correct value. I set up conversions, GA4 and Tag Manager in the Analytics and tags service.
2. A page for the promotion. An ad saying “−20% for Black Friday” can’t lead to the home page with no word about the discount. The price in the ad, on the page and in the cart must be the same. If you don’t have a separate promotion page, I will prepare a landing page for the campaign.
3. Promotion assets. Add to the ad a discount with an occasion, for example “Black Friday” or “Christmas”, and set the validity period right away, so that the asset switches itself on and off.

When to finish: on the last shipping day, not on Christmas Eve

After the last dispatch date people still search for gifts, but they order them with shipping less often. A campaign for physical products should then change its goal.

On the day the shipping deadline passes:

1. Change the ad copy and the promotion assets. Remove “delivery before Christmas” and add what still works: in-store pickup, express courier (if you offer it), a gift card sent by email.
2. Lower the budget or pause the Shopping campaigns for goods that won’t arrive before 24 Dec anyway.
3. Consider a negative seasonality adjustment for 2–4 days after the shipping deadline, if last year’s data shows a clear drop in sales.

In a service business or a brick-and-mortar store, set a break in the ad schedule for the days when the business is closed (e.g. 24–26 Dec), so you don’t pay for calls that nobody will answer.

How to set the budget for the season

Work it out from the goal

You calculate the season budget backwards: how many orders you want and how much you can pay for one. An example with hypothetical numbers: you earn on average PLN 80 on an order, and you can give half of that to advertising, which is PLN 40. If you want 60 orders from ads in the season, you need a budget of about PLN 2,400. How to calculate the cost of a lead and of an order, I described in the guide on Google Ads for a small business.

If you have data from last year, check how much an order cost in November and December compared with October.

Spread the budget across periods

Until 20 Nov an ordinary budget is enough, because the campaign is collecting data. Set the highest one for 21–30 Nov, a higher-than-usual one from 1 Dec to the last shipping day, and then a low one until 26 Dec.

How Google spends the daily budget

In the campaign settings you enter an average daily budget. In Google’s help on the daily budget it says that on a given day a campaign can spend up to 2 times more, but over a month it won’t exceed the daily budget multiplied by 30.4. In practice, raise the budget on the evening before the peak, not at noon on Black Friday, when the campaign may have already used up its limit. You can schedule the change with an automated rule, and after Cyber Monday go back to the lower amount.

The second option is the campaign total budget: one amount for the whole period. In Search campaigns, standard Shopping campaigns and Performance Max, Google recommends at least 3 days (at most 90) and guarantees that the campaign won’t spend more than you enter. You can’t change the budget type after the start date, so this is a solution for a new promotional campaign, for example for 27–30 Nov. In a small account it is usually better to raise the budget in a campaign with a conversion history.

Seasonality adjustments: when they help and when they hurt

A seasonality adjustment is information for Smart Bidding: “on these days I expect a conversion rate that is higher (or lower) by this percentage”.

The rules from Google’s help on seasonality adjustments:

• an adjustment works best for short events, from 1 to 7 days, and with longer use, for example over 14 days, it may not work,
• use it only when you expect a large change in the conversion rate, because Smart Bidding already accounts for ordinary seasonality on its own,
• it works in Search, Shopping, Display and Demand Gen campaigns with target CPA or target ROAS, and in Performance Max with all strategies,
• after the event ends you don’t need to add a reverse adjustment.

Good uses this season are the 27–30 Nov weekend with a strong discount, a one-day sale or a negative adjustment after the shipping deadline. Bad uses are the whole of December with a +30% adjustment, or an adjustment for a 5% discount that changes little.

Where do you get the percentage? From your own data: compare the conversion rate in last year’s promotion with the two weeks before it. Without data, leave the campaign without an adjustment.

How to set it up:

1. In Google Ads click Tools → Budgets and bidding → Adjustments → Seasonal.
2. Click the blue plus button and choose Conversion rate as the adjustment type.
3. Enter a name, dates, scope (campaign types or specific campaigns) and the percentage change.
4. Click Save, then Create seasonality adjustment.

Google changes button names from time to time.

DSA and AI Max: what changes this season

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are campaigns in which Google itself picks queries and landing pages based on the content of your website. Google is moving them to AI Max for Search campaigns. The automatic migration was supposed to start in September 2026, but on 11 June 2026 Google announced on the Google Ads Developer Blog that the automatic DSA migration is postponed to February 2027, and that new DSA campaigns can be created again (until January 2027).

What this means for the holiday season:

• DSA campaigns work the old way this season,
• don’t move DSA manually in November and December, because the change would restart learning at the worst moment; plan a test for January, before the February deadline,
• other Search campaigns may already have been running in AI Max: since 1 September 2026 Google has automatically migrated those with automatically created assets or with campaign-level broad match, so check their settings.

AI Max has three features in the campaign settings: search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion. Check the last one especially: when it is on, Google can send traffic to pages of your domain other than the promotion page. At the peak of the season, review the search terms and landing page reports every few days.

Summary

A holiday campaign starts in early November and ends on the last shipping day, not on Christmas Eve. Use seasonality adjustments only for a few days, and plan the migration of DSA to AI Max for January.

If you want me to prepare a campaign for the season or check your current one before Black Friday, write to me. I price Google Ads setup and management from PLN 990 net one-off, then from PLN 790 net per month or 15% of the budget. You pay the ad budget to Google separately. I reply within 24 hours, and new clients get a 20% discount on their first order.