Leveraging Google Ads to Convert Holiday Shoppers

With the holidays approaching, businesses are wondering how they can attract more shoppers. Shopping never sleeps, and it rarely happens on impulse anymore: according to Google’s Ipsos Holiday Shopping Study, 83% of early October holiday purchases in 2025 were researched before the buyer committed, up from 77% the year before. How can businesses use Google Ads to their advantage during the holidays?

What Is a Holiday PPC Strategy?

A holiday PPC strategy is a seasonal plan for your Google Ads account that raises budgets ahead of demand, targets gift and holiday-specific keywords, uses urgency-driven ad copy and assets, and retargets shoppers who researched but didn’t buy. The goal is to capture peak-season intent without overspending to get it.

When to Start Your Holiday PPC Strategy

The most common mistake in holiday marketing campaigns is timing. Campaigns get built the week before Black Friday, budgets get raised on Thanksgiving, and by the time the account has learned anything, the season is half over. Google’s research shows holiday shoppers are buying from October through January, so the campaigns have to be live before that window opens, not during it.

Here is the timeline we recommend for most Google Ads holiday campaigns:

Early October: Build and test. Launch seasonal ad groups, new landing pages, and any Shopping or Performance Max campaigns you plan to run. Give Smart Bidding time to gather conversion data at normal spend levels.

Late October: Ramp budgets. Increase daily budgets on proven campaigns and apply seasonality adjustments if you expect a sharp change in conversion rate. This is also when gift-intent searches start climbing, and your Black Friday Google Ads should already have conversion history by then.

Mid-November through Cyber Monday: Peak spend. Countdown customizers, promotion assets, and your strongest offers all go live. Watch search impression share daily and be ready to raise caps.

December through early January: Stay on. Shipping cutoffs shift shoppers toward local pickup and gift cards, and post-Christmas spending on returns, exchanges, and gift card redemption is real demand that most holiday advertising abandons.

Google Ads Setup and Preparation for the Holidays

There is a lot to consider going into the Holiday season. With increased sales expected and more search traffic, the first thing to consider is your budget on already existing campaigns, as this will likely need to be higher. New campaigns will need targeted seasonal searches related to gifts, Christmas, xmas, holiday, and other relevant terms, and will also need landing pages for these new terms to keep the quality score up and show that we have content targeting the terms. Don’t forget about long tail keywords that may need to be added for specific products as well. This is the season of research and a lot of people know the exact product they want to buy!

That research phase is where your holiday PPC strategy either earns its budget or wastes it. Keep seasonal keywords in their own ad groups or campaigns so you can control budget and bids separately from evergreen terms, and so January cleanup is as simple as pausing a campaign. Build a negative keyword list for the season too. Terms like “free,” “DIY,” and “ideas” attract browsers who were never going to buy, and they get expensive when search volume spikes.

If you run Shopping campaigns, audit your Merchant Center feed before October ends. Out-of-stock products, missing GTINs, and stale prices get products disapproved at exactly the wrong time for your holiday Google Ads.

Holiday Google Ads Checklist

Use this as a working list for holiday ad campaigns. Most of it applies whether you sell products or services.

Area	What to do	When
Budget	Raise daily budgets on proven campaigns. Set campaign total budgets for flash sales so one strong day cannot exhaust the month.	Late October
Seasonal keywords	Add gift, holiday, and deadline terms in separate ad groups. Build a seasonal negative keyword list.	Early October
Landing pages	Dedicated pages for holiday offers with matching headlines and clear shipping or booking deadlines.	Early October
Ad copy and assets	Countdown customizers, promotion assets, sitelinks to holiday pages, callout assets for shipping and returns.	Late October
Audiences and remarketing	Cart abandoners, product viewers, past purchasers, and Customer Match uploads from your email list.	Early October
Bidding	Seasonality adjustments for short conversion-rate spikes. Review target ROAS or CPA before your Black Friday Google Ads campaigns scale.	Mid-November
Shopping and Performance Max	Feed audit, promotions submitted in Merchant Center, asset groups loaded with holiday creative.	Early October
Conversion tracking	Confirm tags fire on every form, call, and checkout. Check that Google Ads and GA4 counts roughly match.	Before any budget increase

Sales Tactics for Google Ads

Before we talk about Google Ads, let’s consider some of the best traditional sales tactics. Urgency, scarcity, incentives, and attracting attention are what I’m referring to. How can we leverage these tactics in the digital space?

Urgency

Besides the absolute deadline of Christmas, other ways to create urgency in Google Ads would be using the countdown customizer to show when a sale ends, or the latest possible time an order can be placed where the items will still arrive before Christmas.

Shipping cutoff dates are the single most effective urgency message in holiday season advertising, because they are true. Put the date in the headline, not just the description.

Scarcity

Scarcity can be shown using a Google Ads script that displays inventory for items or special promotions for the first X number of people who do Y, such as the first 100 people who order this product will get a free gift.

Merchant Center’s promotion feature can also surface limited-quantity offers directly in Shopping ads, which does the same job without custom scripting.

Incentives

The list of incentives are almost endless. Free shipping, bonus gifts, discounted price, giveaways, personalizing an item such as with a name, or free Christmas gift wrapping just to name a few.

Test one incentive per ad group rather than stacking them. Free shipping alone often outperforms free shipping plus a discount, and it costs you less.

Attracting Attention

Make sure you are taking advantage of every ad asset to take up as much real estate as possible and stand out. In particular, callout assets can be a great way to convey your unique selling proposition. Remember that urgency is the name of the game here, along with value. Know what your customers want such as free shipping, fast delivery, free gift wrapping, or whatever your promotions are or what makes your company awesome.

Promotion assets deserve special attention during the holidays. They display the offer, the code, and the date range right inside the ad, and Google supports occasions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday for them so the ad reads as timely without you rewriting the copy.

Google Ads Features That Matter for the 2026 Holiday Season

The account you ran holiday Google Ads in five years ago is not the account you have today. These are the features worth understanding before you build this season’s holiday advertising.

Performance Max. One campaign that serves across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail, and Maps from a single set of assets and a product feed. For retailers it has largely replaced standalone Shopping campaigns. Feed quality and asset variety determine how well it performs, so load holiday creative into dedicated asset groups rather than mixing it with evergreen assets.

Demand Gen. Built for YouTube, Discover, and Gmail placements, with visual creative and audience targeting. Useful for reaching gift shoppers earlier in the season, before they have a specific product in mind.

AI Max for Search. Expands keyword matching and generates ad text variations from your landing page content. It can catch broad, category-level holiday queries your keyword list would miss, which matters when a large share of shopping searches show broad intent rather than a specific brand. Watch the search terms report closely, since expanded matching and holiday volume together can spend quickly.

Seasonality adjustments. A Smart Bidding setting that tells Google to expect a temporary change in conversion rate for a defined window, such as a three-day sale. Use it for short spikes, not for the whole season, or the algorithm will overcorrect.

Countdown customizers. The current name for what used to be called the countdown function. Insert a live countdown to a sale end or shipping deadline directly in headlines and descriptions.

Merchant Center promotions. Attach a promotion to products so the offer appears as an annotation on Shopping ads and free listings. Promotions need lead time for approval, so submit them before you need them.

Google Ads Campaign Opportunities

This isn’t the time to leave anything on the table or miss any opportunities. If it makes sense for your business, setup Google Shopping campaigns in Google Ads. You’ll also need to make sure Remarketing is setup to target past visitors who may have been in the research phase at the time of their visit. This can be taken a lot further with Dynamic Remarketing, where you can target people who viewed a specific product or category. You can also create a Remarketing list based on a specific action, such as adding a product to the shopping cart, but not completing the purchase. This is the list that has the highest chance of regaining customers, as they already thought about buying.

In 2026, Shopping usually means Performance Max with a Merchant Center feed rather than a standalone Shopping campaign, and remarketing lists work best in holiday marketing campaigns when they are also layered onto Search as observation audiences so you can bid up for returning visitors. Uploading your customer email list as a Customer Match audience gives you one more way to reach past buyers, who are the cheapest holiday conversions you will get.

Don’t just stop at Remarketing though, hopefully you have setup some kind of email automation to remind these customers that items are in their cart or maybe offer them an additional 5% off to get them to finish their purchase!

Controlling the Google Ads Campaign

You want to make sure everything is being controlled and properly targeted to reduce wasted spend. This isn’t just for the holidays, but all the time with Google Ads. There are plenty of ways to control spend and reduce your costs of conversions such as location targeting, timing your ads, targeting demographics and your promotions to the proper segments, match type, site control, mobile apps, budget, keywords, negative keywords, and many more. Everything needs to be controlled and monitored to make sure you’re not wasting money.

Holiday advertising volume magnifies every leak. A broad match keyword that costs you $40 a month in March can cost you $400 a week in November. Review search terms at least twice a week during peak, set ad schedules to your actual fulfillment or sales hours if leads need a human response, and use campaign total budgets when you run a flash sale so a strong day cannot exhaust the month.

Holiday Advertising for Service and B2B Businesses

Most advice about holiday marketing campaigns assumes you sell gifts. Most of our clients do not. Contractors, law firms, manufacturers, healthcare practices, and B2B service companies all see their own version of the holiday rush, and the same holiday PPC strategy applies with a different offer.

The demand drivers are different but just as real. Businesses spend down unused budget before December 31. Patients use dental and health benefits before they reset in January. Homeowners want projects finished before guests arrive. Companies that need a new website, a new CRM, or a marketing plan for next year make those decisions in Q4 so the work can start in January.

That means the urgency tactics above still work. Your deadline is not a shipping cutoff. It is “book before the end of the year,” “use your benefits before they expire,” or “start now to launch in January.” Your incentive might be a free consultation, a locked-in rate for next year, or priority scheduling. And your holiday ad campaigns should be running in October and November, when those decisions are being made, not in December when the budgets are already committed.

Measuring Your Holiday Ad Campaigns

Holiday season advertising produces more data in eight weeks than the rest of the year combined, which is only useful if you trust the numbers.

Before you raise a single budget, confirm that conversion tracking fires on every form, call, and checkout, and that the conversion counts in Google Ads roughly match what you see in Google Analytics 4. A tracking gap discovered in December is a season of spend you cannot evaluate.

During the season, watch cost per lead or cost per acquisition against your industry benchmark rather than against last month. Costs rise in Q4 for everyone. The question is whether yours rose more than the market did.

In January, pull the search terms, audience performance, and ad asset reports before you pause anything. That review is what makes next year’s holiday marketing campaigns better than this year’s, and it is the step most accounts skip.

Holiday PPC Strategy FAQ

When should I start holiday Google Ads campaigns?

Build and launch in early October, ramp budgets in late October, and hit peak spend from mid-November through Cyber Monday. Google’s research shows holiday shoppers are buying from October through January, so campaigns that start on Black Friday miss the front half of the season.

How much should I increase my budget for holiday advertising?

There is no universal number. Start from last year’s Q4 search impression share and impression share lost to budget, then raise budgets until you are no longer losing impressions on your best-converting campaigns. Use seasonality adjustments for short sale windows rather than a season-long budget spike.

Should I pause Google Ads after Christmas?

Usually not. Google reports that 84% of holiday shoppers use Google or YouTube to shop after December 25, driven by gift cards, returns, exchanges, and post-holiday sales. Lowering budgets is reasonable. Pausing entirely hands that traffic to competitors who stayed on.

Does a holiday PPC strategy work for businesses that don't sell products?

Yes. Service and B2B businesses see year-end demand driven by expiring budgets, expiring benefits, and January start dates. The tactics are the same. The deadline and the offer change.

Want to learn more about using Google Ads to convert holiday shoppers?

Contact our Raleigh Google Ads and PPC experts at TheeDigital in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 919-341-8901 or schedule a consultation.

Tags: Paid Search Marketing