Every November the same urge shows up in small business ad accounts. Black Friday is coming, it feels like the biggest week of the year, and leaving the campaigns exactly as they are feels like doing nothing. So owners raise bids, lower targets, add a seasonality adjustment "to tell Google the rush is coming," or launch a brand-new holiday campaign the Monday before.
Google answered most of that in October, on its own podcast. Its Ads Product Liaison, Ginny Marvin, asked product manager Tal Akabas about two things owners worry about this time of year. On changing a target or a budget, he said there "isn't actually a learning period," and that "nothing's going to reset in the back end and throw everything off." On seasonality adjustments for the holidays, he said these "are big events that we understand," that Google's systems "look year over year and have all of this data," and that you "don't necessarily need to go in and apply seasonality adjustments" to take advantage of them.
We checked that against our own accounts from last year. Over Black Friday weekend 2025, nobody touched the bids on the online stores we manage, and their conversion rates rose about 70 percent anyway. The service businesses we manage had the opposite weekend: fewer clicks, fewer of those clicks turning into leads, and slightly higher costs. Both results point the same way. For most small businesses, the right Black Friday move in Google Ads is to change less than you think, and to save your effort for the few cases where you know something Google doesn't.
Google Already Knows It's Black Friday. It Has Last Year's Data.
Most small accounts now run on Smart Bidding: Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value, or a target cost per lead or return on ad spend. Smart Bidding sets a fresh bid in every auction based on how likely that particular search is to turn into a sale. It does that using your account's history and the patterns it sees across Google, and those patterns include every Black Friday it has already seen.
That matters, because the main thing people do to "prepare" Smart Bidding for Black Friday is add a seasonality adjustment. A seasonality adjustment is a scheduled note to Smart Bidding that says, in effect, "for these dates, expect my conversion rate to change by this much." If you tell it to expect a 50 percent higher conversion rate for three days, it bids as though every click is 50 percent more likely to buy, then returns to normal when the window ends.
Google's own help page is careful about when to use one. It says to use seasonality adjustments "only if you expect major changes to conversion rates, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events." It says they work best for short events of one to seven days, and less well for windows longer than 14 days. And it calls them "an advanced tool," which in Google's language usually means most accounts should leave it alone.
Black Friday is not a surprise to anyone, least of all to a bidding system with years of Novembers on file. On the podcast, Akabas put the exception plainly: an adjustment makes sense when you have "some specific new information for your business," such as a promotion "even larger than last year," or a sale that runs "slightly off cycle ahead of Black Friday, or after Cyber Monday." In other words, use it for what Google cannot see coming. The holiday itself is not that.
We Didn't Touch Our Stores' Bids Last Black Friday. Their Conversion Rates Rose About 70%.
We pulled daily numbers from the Google Ads accounts we manage for October through December 2025 and compared Black Friday through Cyber Monday (November 28 to December 1) with the three weeks before Thanksgiving week (October 31 to November 20). None of our accounts had a seasonality adjustment set up. The two online stores with enough traffic to read were both running Performance Max on Maximize Conversion Value, with no target changes for the holiday.
Here is what Smart Bidding did on its own:
- Store A paid 21 percent more per click ($1.23 to $1.49) and bought 22 percent fewer clicks per day. Those clicks converted at 3.49 percent instead of 2.04 percent, a 71 percent jump. Its return on ad spend went from 3.9 to 8.9.
- Store B paid 6 percent more per click ($1.60 to $1.69). Its conversion rate went from 1.90 percent to 3.17 percent, up 67 percent. Return on ad spend rose from 1.67 to 1.99.
Neither store was held back by its budget. Store A's main campaign spent roughly 55 to 65 percent of its daily budget each day of the weekend. Smart Bidding had room to spend more and chose to buy fewer, better clicks instead. It saw buyers arriving, paid a little more to reach them, and skipped the browsing traffic it would normally buy.
Two stores over four days is not a study, and we will not pretend it is. But it lines up with a much larger one. Optmyzr, a company that makes Google Ads software, looked at Black Friday weeks from 2022 to 2024 across roughly 4,300 to 5,900 accounts a year. In the accounts that set no adjustment, Smart Bidding picked up the conversion-rate rise every year on its own (17.5 percent, 11.9 percent and 7.5 percent in the three years), and return on ad spend held roughly steady.
A Seasonality Adjustment Raises Your Bids by Your Guess, Not by What Happens.
The same Optmyzr study compared those accounts with the ones that did set an adjustment for Black Friday. The difference was consistent across all three years.
- Cost per click rose about twice as much. Without an adjustment, clicks cost 16 to 17 percent more during Black Friday week. With one, they cost 32 to 37 percent more.
- Return on ad spend fell. Without an adjustment, it moved between a 2 percent drop and a 5.7 percent gain. With one, it fell 10 to 17 percent every year.
Optmyzr is a vendor and this is observational data, so treat it as a strong pattern, not proof that the adjustment caused the drop. The accounts that chose to set adjustments may have differed in other ways, such as running bigger discounts. Still, the reason it happens is easy to follow.
An adjustment does exactly what you tell it to. If you say "expect 50 percent more conversions," Smart Bidding raises its expectations by 50 percent and bids accordingly. It does not hedge. If the real lift turns out to be 40 percent, every click was bought as if it were worth 1.5 times normal when it was worth 1.4 times normal. That is about 7 percent overpaid on every click, on the most expensive weekend of the year. And almost nobody knows their real Black Friday lift to within 10 points before it happens.
There is an honest other side, and the study shows it too. The accounts with adjustments grew revenue faster: about 50 percent versus 25 percent in 2022, 53 versus 30 percent in 2023, and 40 versus 34 percent in 2024. So an adjustment does buy volume. It buys it at a worse return. If your goal for the weekend is to clear inventory or win market share and margin comes second, that trade can make sense. If you are a small store that needs the weekend to be profitable, it usually does not.
For a Service Business, Black Friday Weekend Is Slower, Not Busier.
Most of what gets written about Black Friday ads is written for stores. Plenty of small businesses running Google Ads do not sell anything online at all. They want calls and form fills: clinics, contractors, schools, B2B manufacturers, professional services.
For them, last year's numbers told a different story. We looked at the 12 lead-generation accounts we manage that had enough traffic to compare, the same weekend against the same three weeks:
- Conversion rate fell in 10 of the 12. The median drop was 38 percent.
- Clicks per day fell in 10 of the 12. The median drop was 34 percent.
- Cost per click rose in 8 of the 12. The median rise was 9 percent.
That makes sense once you say it out loud. Black Friday is a shopping event. People booking a chiropractor, getting a quote on a commercial building or signing a child up for classes are mostly not doing it on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Meanwhile the stores are bidding harder across Google, which can nudge up click prices for everyone sharing those auctions.
Four days of data from 12 accounts is directional, not a law. Your business may differ, and a few do: a gift-card offer, a holiday class or a year-end equipment deal can make the weekend busy. But for most service businesses, here is what the numbers suggest:
- Do not add an upward seasonality adjustment because Black Friday is "big." For you it is probably small.
- Do not judge the account on that weekend. A slow Black Friday is normal, not a sign that something broke. Compare it with the same weekend last year, not with the week before.
- Do not slash budgets or targets in a panic when the weekend looks quiet. Smart Bidding is already pulling back on its own, as the drop in clicks shows. A big reactive cut just leaves you short when normal demand comes back the following week. We made the longer version of that argument in Your Slow Season Is the Wrong Time to Stop Advertising.
Changing a Target Won't Restart the Learning Phase. Launching a New Campaign During Black Friday Week Will.
One of the most repeated pieces of Google Ads advice is that changing a target, or moving a budget by more than 20 percent, sends the campaign back into a "learning phase" and wastes money while it relearns. Google now says plainly that this is not how it works.
Its help page on Smart Bidding learning says changes to budgets, targets, creatives or targeting settings "never remove your historical data or trigger 'Learning' status." They simply apply from the next auction. On the podcast, Akabas explained why: for an existing campaign, the system already knows how bids and results relate, so it "will scale bids directly in proportion to your target changes." We made the same point about budgets in A Bigger Google Ads Budget Buys Pricier Leads First. Raise It 20% and Wait Two Weeks. That post still holds: a small step is easier to read, even though it does not reset anything.
What does trigger the "Learning" status, according to the same help page, is a structural change:
- A new bid strategy, or one you switched back on.
- A composition change, meaning campaigns, ad groups or keywords added to or removed from a bid strategy.
- A significant change to the conversion goals the campaign is bidding toward.
That gives a clear rule for the week before Black Friday. Changing a number on a campaign that is already running is fine if your business has a reason. Launching something new is the risky move. A brand-new holiday campaign has no history of its own, and Akabas's advice was to start any new campaign "a couple of days" before a promotion so it is running smoothly when the promotion starts. For this year that means by about Monday, November 23, not the night before.
Two cautions still apply. Google's same page asks you to avoid "making multiple target changes within a single conversion cycle unless there is a clear business need," because each change takes a cycle to settle, and judging it before then means judging half the results. And if your conversion tracking hiccups during the busiest week, Smart Bidding will learn from the bad data. We covered what to do about that in Your Google Ads Tracking Broke for a Week. Smart Bidding Learned From Every Day of It.
A Seasonality Adjustment Only Pays Off on a Sale Google Can't See Coming.
None of this makes seasonality adjustments useless. It makes them specific. The test is simple: does Google have any way of knowing about this event from last year's data or everyone else's? If not, an adjustment can help.
Good reasons to use one:
- An off-cycle sale. A sale the week before Thanksgiving, or one that starts the day after Cyber Monday, falls outside the pattern Google expects.
- A discount much deeper than last year's. If last Black Friday was 15 percent off and this year is 40 percent off, the conversion rate jump will be bigger than history predicts.
- An email-only or one-day flash sale. A sudden surge from your own customer list is something only you know is coming.
- An outage or problem in reverse. If your checkout breaks or you run out of stock for a few days, a downward adjustment tells Smart Bidding the low conversion rate is temporary. For tracking failures, Google's data exclusions do this job instead.
Keep the window short, in the 1 to 7 day range Google recommends, and set the number on the low side of your honest estimate. A 25 percent guess that should have been 35 costs you a little volume. A 50 percent guess that should have been 25 costs you money on every click.
For a scheduled promotion, look at Promotion Mode instead. Google has been rolling it out to Search and Performance Max campaigns. You schedule a sale window, and it raises the budget and loosens the return target for those days, then switches itself off. We explained how it differs from a seasonality adjustment in On August 17, Google Starts Taking Your Bid Target Literally. If it is available in your account and you are running a real sale, it is the more direct tool.
One trap to avoid: using adjustments to stop overspending. Andrew Lolk, who runs a Google Ads agency, described a pattern he sees almost every month in accounts he reviews. Smart Bidding starts spending more than the owner wants, so the owner sets a negative seasonality adjustment to calm it down. It works, until the adjustment expires and spending jumps right back. So they set another, then another. He has seen accounts running one nonstop, at minus 80 percent. If spending is too high on a normal week, the fix is the target or the budget itself, not a temporary note that runs out.
What to Do Before Thanksgiving
If you want to do something useful this week, spend 20 minutes on checks, not changes.
- Make sure conversion tracking is counting. Place a test order or submit a test form and confirm it shows up in Google Ads within a day. A tag that broke during a website update is the single most expensive thing that can go wrong on Black Friday, because Smart Bidding will bid on bad numbers.
- Check that your budget is not capping profitable days. If a campaign is marked "Limited by budget" and is hitting its target comfortably, Black Friday is a reasonable time to give it room. If it is not hitting its target, more budget will not fix that.
- Do not launch new campaigns or switch bid strategies this week. If something new has to run for the holiday, it should be live by Monday, November 23.
- Skip the seasonality adjustment unless your sale is off-cycle, much deeper than last year's, or a surprise.
- If you are a service business, expect a quiet weekend and judge the week after, not the weekend itself.
Black Friday rewards preparation that happened months earlier, a point we made from the store side in Black Friday Is Won in September, Not November. The week before is mostly about not breaking what already works. If you would rather have someone else run these checks and watch the account through the holiday, that is what we do every day for the Google Ads accounts we manage. And if you would rather handle it yourself, you now know what Google says, what last year's numbers showed, and which few changes are worth making.
