In 2026, Black Friday falls on Friday, November 27, and Cyber Monday on Monday, November 30. That sounds like plenty of time. For Google Ads it is not: whatever you restructure in November is still in its learning period at the peak, and whatever you only submit during Black Week may still be stuck in review. That is why I plan backwards from the Friday.
In this article you will find the plan I use to prepare online shops and smaller retailers in the DACH region for the Black Friday weekend: the dates, the tracking check, seasonality adjustments, budgets and bids, promotions in ads and in Merchant Center, Performance Max and Shopping during the peak, and the days after Cyber Monday. Statements about Google features are based on the Google Ads Help Center and the Merchant Center Help Center, and the sources are listed at the end. Where I add my own assessment from practice, I say so.
The 2026 dates at a glance
| Date | Weekday | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| October 15 | Thursday | According to Google, promotion assets with the Black Friday or Cyber Monday occasion can start serving |
| November 13 | Friday | My buffer: ads, assets and promotions are submitted |
| November 23 | Monday | Many shops start their Black Week |
| November 27 | Friday | Black Friday |
| November 30 | Monday | Cyber Monday |
| December 15 | Tuesday | Last day of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday occasions in promotion assets |
Table scrolls sideways
The November 13 row is my own working rule, not a Google requirement. That many shops already start on the Monday before Black Friday is an observation from my practice.
The plan, working backwards from November 27
Until mid-October: the foundation
Anything that triggers a learning period should be done now: new campaigns, a change of bid strategy, larger restructures in Performance Max or a new conversion goal. According to Google, it can take up to about 50 conversion events or 3 conversion cycles for the bid strategy to adjust to a new target. Google says this phase is triggered when you create or reactivate a bid strategy, change its settings, or add or remove campaigns, ad groups or keywords. In a shop with only a few orders per week, that can easily stretch to several weeks.
In parallel, you clean up the product feed: open Diagnostics in Merchant Center, check disapproved products, and review availability and prices. And you check tracking, more on that in a moment.
From October 15: set up promotion assets
According to the Google Ads Help Center, promotion assets with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday occasions can serve from October 15 to December 15. They enhance text ads on the Search Network as well as Shorts and in-stream video ads. You create them under Campaigns, Assets, the plus icon, and then the promotion option. You can add them at account, campaign or ad group level, and according to Google the most specific level wins: an ad group asset takes priority over a campaign asset, which in turn takes priority over an account asset.
There is one rule many people miss: according to Google, promotion assets for special occasions must have been created or edited within six months before their start date, otherwise they will not serve. So you do not simply reactivate last Black Friday's asset. You create it again or edit it. Optionally, you can add a promo code or a minimum order value.
Early November: submit ads, landing pages and promotions
According to Google, most ads are reviewed within one business day, and if you need an ad reviewed by a specific date, you should submit it a few days in advance. My buffer is November 13: whatever should run on Black Friday is submitted by then. If something gets disapproved, there is still a full working week to fix it.
The same applies to the landing page for the promotion. It should be live before you submit the ads, not go live on Friday morning. Merchant Center promotions also belong in this window, details below.
November 16 to 20: freeze and fine-tuning
In this week I stop changing the structure. Instead I decide how much daily budget is available for the promotion days, set up the seasonality adjustment if needed (according to Google you can create it in advance), and add the reduced price with its effective dates to the feed. Finally, a quick check with the warehouse: which bestsellers have enough stock, and which do not?
Black Week: November 23 to 30
Now it is about monitoring, not rebuilding. Every day I check the “limited by budget” status, Diagnostics in Merchant Center, sold-out products and search terms. I do not change bid targets on a daily basis in these days. The exception is a real error, for example a broken conversion tag.
From December 1: back to normal
What to do after Cyber Monday has its own section further down.
Tracking check before the peak
If measurement fails on Black Friday, Smart Bidding steers the highest-revenue day of the year with wrong data. That is why I check these points by early November at the latest:
- Status of the conversion actions. The purchase conversion must be actively recording, not showing “Tag inactive” or “Unverified”.
- Test purchase with Tag Assistant. Place a complete order once and check whether the tag fires on the confirmation page and which value is passed.
- The right conversion value. The value passed should be the amount actually paid after discount, not the list price. From my practice: discount codes that only apply at checkout often do not make it into the value passed, and then ROAS looks better during Black Week than it really is.
- Transaction ID. According to Google, conversions with the same transaction ID for the same conversion action are not counted twice. That protects you from double counting when buyers reload the confirmation page.
- Consent banner. If you add pop-ups, banners or a different theme for the promotion, check afterwards that the consent banner still works correctly and consent signals still arrive.
How to set up the basics properly is covered in my post on setting up Google Ads conversion tracking.
Using seasonality adjustments correctly
Seasonality adjustments tell Smart Bidding in advance that the conversion rate will change for a specific period. According to Google, they are available for, among others, Search, Shopping and Display campaigns with target CPA or target ROAS, and for Performance Max. According to the Help Center, you find them by clicking the Tools icon, then Budgets and bidding, Adjustments and the Seasonal option at the top. There you set a name, start and end dates, the expected change in conversion rate and the scope, meaning campaign types or individual campaigns.
Two statements from Google matter most for Black Friday:
- According to Google, seasonality adjustments work best for short periods of 1 to 7 days and may not work as well for periods longer than 14 days.
- According to Google, Smart Bidding already makes automatic adjustments for seasonal events. You should therefore only use seasonality adjustments if you expect significant changes in conversion rates.
Black Friday through Cyber Monday is four days, so it fits well. The whole Black Week from November 23 to 30 would be eight days, already above the range Google calls ideal. After the end date, the adjustment expires automatically.
How I set the value is my own practice, not a Google rule: I compare the conversion rate of last year's promotion days with the two to three weeks before. A worked example with assumed numbers: if last year's conversion rate from Friday to Monday was 4% instead of the usual 2%, that would be an increase of 100%. I still rarely enter the full value, because according to Google Smart Bidding already factors in a normal Black Friday on its own. The adjustment is mainly worth it when your own promotion is clearly stronger than usual, for example an unusually high discount for just a few days.
According to Google, an adjustment can also go down. Some accounts see a dip in the days before Black Friday because buyers wait for the promotion. I only set a negative adjustment for that if the pattern is clearly visible in last year's data. More on seasonal planning across the whole year is in my post on seasonal campaigns in Google Ads.
Promotion mode: the new beta for promotion periods
New this year is so-called promotion mode. In the Google Ads Help Center article on creating Performance Max campaigns, it appears as an optional step in the budget section: for a promotion period with start and end dates, it is meant to maximize the reach of your ads. Google itself points out there that your return on ad spend may be impacted because the campaign rapidly increases spend.
According to reports from Search Engine Journal and PPC Land, the latter citing Google's Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin, promotion mode has been a beta for Search and Performance Max campaigns since June 2026. According to those reports, it is meant for periods of 3 to 14 days, temporarily applies a tolerance to the ROAS target, allows additional daily budget and then automatically returns to the previous settings. According to Ginny Marvin, it can be combined with seasonality adjustments because the two work on different levers. Whether your account has access to the beta, you can only see in the account itself.
My assessment: in this first year I would not switch it on in all campaigns at once, but in one campaign with enough conversion data and a clear budget limit. Google itself warns about weaker ROAS, and you should have factored that in beforehand.
Budgets and bids during Black Week
Daily budget. According to Google, a campaign can spend up to twice its average daily budget on a single day, but no more than 30.4 times that amount over the month. On strong days, Google already uses this headroom on its own. If a campaign still runs into “limited by budget”, I raise the budget the evening before or early in the morning, not in the afternoon when a large part of the demand is already gone.
Campaign total budgets. For a dedicated promotion campaign, you can set a total budget for a period of 3 to 90 days instead of a daily budget, according to Google for Search, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns. Google paces spend across the period without a daily limit, but never charges more than the total budget. The limitations: this only works for new campaigns, and the budget type cannot be changed later. From my practice, I would only use such a campaign as an addition, because it starts without any history of its own. The main business stays in the established campaigns.
The August 17, 2026 change. This is the first Black Friday after Google's change to target-based bid strategies: according to Google, budget-constrained campaigns with target CPA or target ROAS are aligned more closely to the target you set instead of clearly outperforming it. For the peak, my take is this: if a campaign runs into its budget limit during Black Week, I check the budget first and only then the target. The details are in my post on the August 2026 bid strategy change.
Bid targets. Lowering target ROAS for the promotion days changes the bid strategy's settings, and according to Google that can trigger a new learning period. That is why I change targets at most once during Black Week, with a fixed date for going back. Seasonality adjustments have the advantage that they end on their own.
Making offers visible: ads, feed and Merchant Center
I described promotion assets for Search ads above in the plan. Depending on the campaign type, there are further options.
Automated promotions
According to Google, there are also automated promotions at account level: Google pulls offers from your website and shows them as an asset. The Help Center explains how to turn the feature on and says it is only available for Search and Performance Max campaigns with location assets in which no manually created promotions are running. For a pure online shop without a physical store, it is therefore usually not relevant. For Black Friday I prefer manual promotion assets anyway, because then I control exactly which discount appears in which period.
Merchant Center promotions
For Shopping ads and the product ads in Performance Max, the promotion runs through Merchant Center. According to the Merchant Center Help Center, promotions are shown in Germany, and also in France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the US, among other countries. Austria and Switzerland are not on the list (as of October 2026). According to Google, a promotion can run for a maximum of six months (183 days).
On review, Google says: promotions should be submitted as early as possible. Review takes place during weekday business hours and is typically completed within 12 hours of the promotion's effective start time, but can take up to 24 hours. My conclusion: a promotion submitted only on the weekend before Cyber Monday is an unnecessary risk, since Black Friday is a Friday and Cyber Monday is a Monday.
Reduced price in the feed
You pass the promotional price in the feed via the sale_price attribute. According to Google, you still need to submit the regular price in the price attribute. With sale_price_effective_date, you define when the reduced price applies. Without this date, according to Google, the sale price applies immediately. I always set the date range so that the price switches back automatically after Cyber Monday. And I make sure the feed and the product page show the same price, even if the discount in the shop runs via a plugin or banner. From my practice, that is where most November feed problems come from. What else a clean feed needs is covered in the glossary under Google Merchant Center.
Price indications in Germany
For shops in Germany, Section 11(1) of the Price Indication Ordinance (Preisangabenverordnung) applies to price reductions. Translated, it says: anyone obliged to state a total price must, whenever announcing a price reduction for a product to consumers, state the lowest total price they applied to consumers within the last 30 days before applying the price reduction. This also affects discount claims in ads. I am not a lawyer: how to implement this correctly in your shop and your ad copy is something to clarify with legal counsel.
Performance Max and Shopping during the peak
In Performance Max and Shopping, the feed matters more than any ad. During Black Week I check three things every day: are bestsellers sold out but still listed as in stock in the feed? Do prices in the feed and the shop match? And does Diagnostics in Merchant Center report new disapprovals?
From my practice: when a bestseller sells out in the middle of the promotion, Performance Max spreads the budget across the remaining products, and those do not always have the same margin. That is why checking the product reports belongs in the daily routine.
I add Black Friday images and copy for Performance Max early to the existing asset groups, instead of building new asset groups in November. How Performance Max works in general is explained in my Performance Max guide, and the basics of product ads in my Google Shopping guide.
After Cyber Monday: what to do on December 1
- Seasonality adjustments expire automatically on the end date. Still check that the end date really was November 30.
- Budgets and targets you reset yourself if you raised or loosened them manually.
- Ad copy mentioning “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday” you pause or replace. Promotion assets with an end date expire on their own.
- The feed switches back if you set
sale_price_effective_date. Otherwise you change the price manually. - The evaluation I only do once conversion lag has passed. For shops with many returns, I also look at the numbers after returns.
- Data exclusions are, according to Google, only meant for problems with tracking, the website or data imports, and not for regular or long-term use. An unusually strong Black Friday is not a reason for a data exclusion.
The Christmas season starts right after. From my practice, it pays to communicate the last order date for delivery before Christmas early in ads and on landing pages.
Common mistakes from my practice
Restructuring in November. New campaign structure, new bid strategy, new conversion goal, all two weeks before the peak. The learning period then lands right in Black Week.
Target lowered and forgotten. Target ROAS is loosened for Black Friday and is still at the promotion value in January.
An adjustment for the whole month. A seasonality adjustment for all of November is far beyond the 1 to 7 days Google recommends it for.
Promotions submitted too late. The Merchant Center promotion for Cyber Monday is created on Saturday, but review happens on weekdays.
Discount in the shop, old price in the feed. Shop and feed show different prices, and products drop out of serving in the middle of the promotion.
Black Friday copy in December. Ads without an end date keep advertising a promotion for days after it has ended.
My short checklist
- By mid-October: structure, bid strategy and conversion goals final, feed cleaned up
- From October 15: promotion assets with the Black Friday and Cyber Monday occasions created
- By November 13: ads, landing pages and Merchant Center promotions submitted
- November 16 to 20: budget plan, seasonality adjustment,
sale_pricewith effective dates - November 23 to 30: check budget status, Merchant Center Diagnostics and stock every day
- From December 1: budgets, targets and copy rolled back, evaluation after conversion lag
If you want a second pair of eyes
If you want to know before Black Friday whether tracking, feed and bid strategy will hold up, I go through exactly these points in your account in a Google Ads audit (from €500). In ongoing Google Ads management (from €1,000 per month), seasonal planning is a fixed part of the work.
Sources
- Google Ads Help, about seasonality adjustments: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10369906
- Google Ads Help, create a seasonality adjustment: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9352512
- Google Ads Help, about promotion assets: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7367521
- Google Ads Help, about automated promotions: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/18057626
- Google Ads Help, create a Performance Max campaign (promotion mode): support.google.com/google-ads/answer/15864533
- Search Engine Journal, Google Ads bidding and budgeting updates: searchenginejournal.com/google-ads-three-bidding-budgeting-updates/579292/
- PPC Land, Promotion mode is here: Google's Ginny Marvin explains what actually changed: ppc.land/promotion-mode-is-here-googles-ginny-marvin-explains-what-actually-changed/
- Google Ads Help, about campaign total budgets: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10486938
- Google Ads Help, about average daily budgets: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6385083
- Google Ads Help, how long the learning period lasts and what affects it: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/13020501
- Google Ads Help, changes to target-based bid strategies: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17061251
- Google Ads Help, about the ad review process: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722120
- Google Ads Help, use a transaction ID to minimize duplicate conversions: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6386790
- Google Ads Help, about data exclusions: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10370710
- Merchant Center Help, get started with promotions: support.google.com/merchants/answer/13422697
- Merchant Center Help, promotions data specification: support.google.com/merchants/answer/2906014
- Merchant Center Help, promotions review: support.google.com/merchants/answer/4588464
- Merchant Center Help, sale_price attribute: support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324471
- Merchant Center Help, sale_price_effective_date attribute: support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324460
- German Price Indication Ordinance (PAngV), Section 11: gesetze-im-internet.de/pangv_2022/__11.html
As of: October 2026
