Two things were true during the three weeks around BFCM: the four-day Black Friday-to-Cyber Monday window had the highest click costs, but it also had the highest conversion rates, in the same account, on the same products.

We wanted to see what that friction looks like in actual dollars, so we pulled performance data from over 4,200 Google Ads accounts and 22,800 campaigns across last year’s holiday season. During the four days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, Standard Shopping ROAS dropped 22% and Performance Max dropped 13%. Shoppers arrived converting better than at any other point in the quarter, but click costs simply climbed faster than conversion rates did.

Understanding what happened underneath those numbers makes it much easier to build a plan that actually protects your margins.

Download now: The Shopping Season Readiness Report

The 3 distinct phases of BFCM traffic

Most people fall into the trap of treating the holiday rush as one continuous marathon. In reality, you’re playing three completely different games across three weeks, and using the exact same playbook for all of them is an easy way to burn through your margin. Here where some of the observations from the report:

• The week before Black Friday: This is the most efficient high-intent traffic you’ll see all November. Standard Shopping converted 6.2% of clicks in the pre-sale week against 6.7% during the actual four-day weekend. That’s a relatively small drop in conversion rate for a much cheaper click.
• The four days of the BFCM sale: This is an execution window. Whatever bid strategy, budget, and target you have running by Thursday night should already be validated. The volume will be huge, so the cost of fixing an error mid-weekend compounds fast.
• The week after Cyber Monday: This is the phase that quietly costs the most. A week after Black Friday, Standard Shopping conversion rate had fallen 7.3% below its pre-BFCM level, while CPC was still 10.2% higher. High costs and low demand running simultaneously for seven full days will drain your profit fast.

ROAS by BFCM window

Mapping out exact calendar dates for all three windows before November hits is the best way to protect your margins.

Calculating your true breakeven Target ROAS

“Black Friday has plenty of volatility, with click costs up 29% to 46% from the week before, and you know that now. So you can decide the Target ROAS in your Shopping and PMax campaigns in September.

Here’s the decision in plain numbers. Divide 1 by your gross margin to find the ROAS where you break even. If you normally target 600%, then everything between your usual target and your breakeven number is profit you can choose to give up for more volume during the sale. Pick a number in that range and set it before BFCM starts.

And if the gap between your usual target and your breakeven is less than about 20%, now you may not have room to chase peak volume at all. You can decide that now rather than waiting for Black Friday morning.”

— Frederick Vallaeys, Co-Founder & CEO, Optmyzr

So, if you’re comfortable giving up close to all your profit for volume during the sale, that’s a legitimate call to make. And brands with a smaller margin gap may not have room to chase peak volume without taking a loss. Recognizing that constraint in September is important instead of figuring it out mid-sale.

It’s also best to leave seasonality adjustments switched off. Our three-year study tracking 6,000 advertisers showed that accounts using manual seasonality adjustments saw CPC inflation double and ROAS decline every single year. The group that didn’t touch anything kept ROAS stable, and even improved it, in all three years.

The mechanism matters as much as the outcome. A seasonality adjustment tells Smart Bidding conversion rate will be a certain amount higher, starting now, and the system takes that at face value rather than testing into it. If your estimate is off, even a little, you overpay on every auction for as long as the adjustment runs, while Smart Bidding was likely already reading the real signal on its own.

Put those two findings together and the advice for 2026 is simple. Don’t tell the algorithm what’s coming. Tell it what you’ll actually accept, set well before the sale based on your own margin math, and leave the seasonality adjustment switched off unless you’re dealing with something Google genuinely has no history for you on.

Bidding strategies and conversion value tracking

Within PMax, two bidding strategies ended up paying almost the same for a click by December: Maximize Conversion Value and Maximize Conversions.

Maximize Conversions earned 46.1% less revenue per click than Maximize Conversion Value by December: $2.32 versus $4.30. But one thing to note here is that Maximize Conversions doesn’t look at actual order values; it optimizes strictly for conversion volume. It does its assigned job, but it’s worth looking at, if that’s the kind of strategy you want for your business.

On the Standard Shopping side, the same idea shows up across four different strategies instead of two: Target Spend, Manual CPC, Target ROAS, and Maximize Conversion Value, each pulling in wildly different order values and conversion rates. Target ROAS was the default for most accounts in the panel by a wide margin, and it lost real ground in December as conversion rate fell while cost per click barely moved, a target the system could no longer clear on its own.

ROAS by bidding strategy, Oct–Dec

The practical point is to audit your conversion values before changing bid strategy. If the values are reliable, value-based bidding has a trustworthy signal to work from. If they aren’t, Maximize Conversions can be a safer baseline until the value signal is fixed.

If you’re not confident in that data yet, Maximize Conversions is a safer floor to stand on through the sale.

Reassess PMax and Standard Shopping separately after BFCM

You should reassess the week after BFCM separately. PMax CPC had already fallen 1.7% below its pre-BFCM level, while Standard Shopping CPC was still 10.2% higher. So it’s better to not assume both campaign types need the same post-sale adjustment. Our recommendation is to review demand, CPC, and efficiency separately before changing budgets or targets.

Evaluating these channels independently prevents premature budget cuts or over-aggressive target increases when auction conditions diverge. Standard Shopping often continues to encounter lingering auction heat and elevated click costs into December, whereas PMax can dynamically reallocate spend across alternative networks to capture cheaper inventory. So when you inspect post-sale conversion rates, CPCs, and overall efficiency for each channel on its own, you can make targeted adjustments that protect your profit margins.

How to Decide PMax vs. Standard Shopping

Accounts running Performance Max and Standard Shopping side-by-side landed closely with each other in December (680% vs 666%). Choosing one campaign type over the other for the entire account isn’t where performance is won or lost, it’s best to go with catalog segmentation.

ROAS by account structure, Nov–Dec

Rather than choosing a campaign type from an external benchmark, compare PMax and Standard Shopping inside your own account. In accounts running both, December ROAS was 680% for PMax and 666% for Standard Shopping, with identical $0.64 CPCs. That suggests your own catalog economics matter more than the campaign label

Audit the Network Split Before the Spend Spikes

Holiday buyers behave differently because they’re shopping for spouses, relatives, and picky friends. Visual channels struggle when a buyer’s mindset changes rapidly. In Performance Max, YouTube drove nearly 10% of total impressions last year, but generated barely 2% of actual conversion value.

Discover clicks looked cheap all quarter, but its conversion rate collapsed by more than half between November and December. Running an audit with PPC Investigator before the season ramps up shows which networks are eating budget on volume that never converts.

“You have to remember the Q4 buyer is….. weird. Sometimes they’re shopping for others, sometimes they’re self-gifting, sometimes they’re trying to find a gift for a stubborn person (probably my mom), sometimes they’re buying something for a celebration. In turn, some of the more visual mediums may struggle with targeting as a person’s mindset could change in an instant.

YouTube’s targeting runs on what the viewer is into, not who they’re buying for, and Q4 breaks that assumption for a huge share of traffic. That’s likely why YouTube pulls in almost 10% of PMax’s impressions but only 2% of the conversion value, with a lower revenue per engagement than any other network carrying real volume.”

— Aaron Levy, Evangelist, Optmyzr

Performance Max ROAS by network, Oct–Dec

Build Your Branded Split on Actual Traffic

In PMax, branded campaigns beat non-branded every single month, by a fairly steady margin. In Standard Shopping, non-branded won every month too, but the size of that win shrank fast, from a wide gap in October down to barely a difference by December. On the surface, that reads like Standard Shopping’s branded traffic quietly caught up over the quarter.

ROAS by brand type, Oct–Dec

Here’s the catch: Standard Shopping has no keyword layer, so there’s no query for Google to actually mark as branded the way there is in Search. What gets labeled branded here is just whatever an advertiser named the campaign. A campaign named after the brand can still be serving a catalog full of entirely generic queries, and a campaign that never mentions the brand in its name can still be picking up branded searches regardless.

So before building a branded and non-branded budget split for this BFCM, pull the actual search terms report for whichever campaigns you’d call branded and check what share of that traffic genuinely contains your brand. If it’s low, the split you’re about to build is really a split based on how campaigns were named a year or two ago. The same labeling logic mentioned earlier for margin bands applies here too, tag by actual branded share of search terms rather than by campaign name.

You can compare your performance with last year’s vertical benchmarks by downloading the report here.

5 essential BFCM campaign setup and feed hygiene

It’s important to have proper campaign setup and precise feed management before holiday traffic peaks. So here are a few essential things to keep in mind to ensure your campaigns run smoothly and protect your profit margins.

Write mid-sale budget rules in advance

Setting a target ahead of the sale solves the algorithm’s half of this problem. It doesn’t solve the human half. By early afternoon on Black Friday, plenty of accounts have already spent their daily budget and are sitting on a strong ROAS number, and the instinct in that moment is always the same: increase the budget.

The harder question is by how much, and whether the answer changes if that number were meaningfully lower, or if the product driving it only has a handful of units left in stock. You are staring at a noisy dashboard, stock is moving fast, and it is easy to over-allocate on instinct.

So write the actual rule down before the season starts instead: something like, if ROAS stays 50 points above breakeven and stock supports current sell-through, automatically increases daily budgets by 20%.

To further support and ease this, you can set KPI Alerts and Budget Alerts on Optmyzr to fire the instant ROAS or spend crosses the line you wrote down, so you’re quickly informed of your thresholds and you can make an informed decision.

Push promotional pricing straight into the product feed

Shopping campaigns carry the majority of ad-driven ecommerce revenue in most accounts, and they’re also the channel with the least room for on-the-fly correction, since you’re bidding on product groups pulled straight from a feed rather than adjusting individual ad copy. That makes feed accuracy one of the highest-leverage, least glamorous things to get right before BFCM.

There are often a few basic mistakes that we tend to overlook, like putting the promotional price only in a coupon code rather than the actual feed price. This could mean the Shopping ads keep displaying full price straight through the sale, quietly suppressing click-through rate on the exact days you need it highest.

Worse, if the feed price and the live site price genuinely don’t match, Google can flag the listing for a price discrepancy and disapprove it, and re-approval after that kind of flag has historically taken several hours, sometimes longer once review queues back up during a high-volume period.

The practical fix is to update the feed the moment site pricing changes, and to tighten that cycle further for the BFCM window itself, since inventory and pricing move faster than a standard refresh accounts for.

To catch missing attributes, pricing mismatches, or disapproved listings before they suppress ad visibility, run automated checks with Shopping Feed Audits or Account Structure Audits prior to peak traffic.

Pre-upload, review, and tag holiday creative

Two small habits prevent most of the chaos that shows up in Black Friday post-mortems. First, label existing, non-promotional ads as evergreen before swapping in Black Friday creative, and give the new creative a year-specific tag rather than a generic one. It sounds trivial until the year someone reactivates an expired promotion by accident because nothing distinguishes it from this year’s version.

Second, write and upload Black Friday-specific ads at least five to seven days ahead of when they need to go live. Ad review can take anywhere from a few hours to well over a day, so it’s better to be cautious.

Segment your catalog by real margin and stock data

Sending high-cost holiday traffic to low-margin items or products with only three units left in stock burns margin fast. Treating an entire product catalog as one uniform group forces Smart Bidding to blend margins together, which quietly overspends on easy-to-convert cheap items while starving the items that actually generate profit.

Instead of manually editing custom labels in Google Merchant Center, Smart Product Labeler dynamically tags products by margin band, sales velocity, and inventory levels. When an item’s stock drops below a safe threshold, the label shifts automatically, stepping down campaign aggression before you waste ad dollars on an item about to sell out anyway.

Monitor performance in real-time during the sale

Relying on standard daily reporting during peak sales can leave you blind to sudden spend surges or unexpected drops in conversion rate until it is too late to react. When traffic spikes across short windows like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, waiting for end-of-day stats means you risk overspending on underperforming campaigns or missing opportunities to scale winning products.

To protect your margins, establish intraday tracking checkpoints to evaluate core performance metrics every few hours throughout peak sale days. Monitoring performance in real time allows you to make swift, data-driven decisions on budget pacing and bid adjustments before minor fluctuations become costly losses.

For quick oversight, you can use Optmyzr’s Sale Day Command Center, which updates every 30 minutes to track clicks, cost, and conversions. It provides a centralized view across your ad platforms so you can respond to holiday traffic shifts.

The complete BFCM prep timeline

BFCM performance is going to move quickly. But the decisions don’t have to be improvised. Set your margin guardrails before the sale, watch click costs and conversion rates together, and review PMax and Standard Shopping separately once the rush is over.

You can download the full Shopping Season Readiness Report for the complete benchmarks and checklist.

And if you need continuous monitoring, proper bidding controls, and precise catalog segmentation,

Optmyzr provides the tools and automated guardrails you need to stay ahead of traffic spikes and protect your profit margins. Sign up for a free trial today to manage your campaigns for this holiday season.