August feels like an odd time to be thinking about Christmas, and most business owners we speak to agree — right up until we show them what happens to cost per click in their industry once the last week of November arrives. By then, every other business chasing the same customers has woken up to the same idea at the same time, and you’re all bidding against each other for the same clicks. Getting a Christmas Google Ads campaign right has as much to do with when you start as what you actually run.
Why the last-minute rush costs more
Google Ads works on an auction. When demand for a particular search goes up, so does the cost of showing an ad against it, and nowhere is that clearer than the run-up to Christmas. Retailers, tradespeople doing last-minute jobs before the holidays, and service businesses all pile into the same auctions in November and December, and cost per click climbs as a result — sometimes sharply, depending on the sector.
A business that’s built its campaign, tested its ads and worked out what converts back in September or October is in a much stronger position going into that period than one starting from scratch. You’re not fighting to learn what works at the exact moment it’s most expensive to get it wrong.
It’s not just retail that gets busier
We tend to think of Christmas PPC as a retail thing, but a good chunk of our clients aren’t selling gifts at all. Tradespeople get a rush of enquiries from people wanting jobs finished before family visit for the holidays. Hospitality and events businesses see a spike in bookings for parties and get-togethers. B2B companies often see a different pattern — a push to spend remaining budget before the financial year-end, or a quiet lull once decision-makers are out of the office, which is worth planning around just as much as a busy period is.
The point isn’t that every business needs a “Christmas campaign” in the traditional sense. It’s that search behaviour changes for most industries in some way from October through to the new year, and knowing what that change looks like for your business, rather than guessing, is what August and September are for.
What actually needs doing before November
Building a seasonal campaign from a standing start in November means rushing decisions that deserve more thought. There’s a handful of things worth getting sorted well in advance.
Budget is the obvious one. If you’re planning to increase spend for a busier period, it’s worth deciding that number properly rather than reacting to how the account is performing week to week once things are already live — we’ve covered how to work out a sensible Google Ads budget in more detail in an earlier post, and the same logic applies to setting a seasonal uplift rather than just picking a bigger figure and hoping.
Landing pages need attention too. If you’re running seasonal offers, gift guides or holiday-specific messaging, sending that traffic to a generic page that doesn’t match what the ad promised is one of the most common ways a Christmas campaign underperforms. Building or updating pages ahead of time — rather than launching ads before the pages they point to are ready — gives you time to actually test them.
Remarketing lists benefit from an early start as well. If you want to be showing ads to people who visited your site in November when they come back to finish researching in December, that audience needs to exist already, which means the tracking and the traffic that builds it needs to be running well before the campaign that relies on it.
And don’t overlook the basics that sit outside Google Ads entirely. Holiday opening hours on your Google Business Profile, stock or availability messaging, and delivery cut-off dates all need to be accurate before the traffic arrives, not updated after the first customer complaint — we’ve written before about the Google Business Profile mistakes that quietly cost businesses enquiries, and a stale holiday hours listing is exactly the kind of thing that catches people out every year.
Testing before it gets expensive
One of the real advantages of starting now is that you get to test cheaply. Running new ad copy, new keywords or a new landing page in September, when competition and cost per click are both lower than they’ll be in November, means you find out what works while mistakes are inexpensive. By the time the busy period arrives, you’re refining a campaign that’s already proven itself rather than launching one blind into the most competitive weeks of the year.
This is particularly true if you’re planning to try something new — a different campaign type, a fresh audience, or a product line you haven’t advertised before. Give it room to settle and gather data before it needs to perform under pressure.
A sensible timeline, roughly speaking
There’s no single correct schedule, because it depends heavily on the industry and how long your typical customer takes to decide, but a rough shape works for most of the businesses we manage campaigns for. August and September are for planning: working out budget, deciding on offers, and getting landing pages built. October is for testing: getting campaigns live at a smaller scale so there’s real data to work from before the pressure’s on. November through to the days before Christmas is when spend typically increases to match demand, running on a structure that’s already been proven rather than one still finding its feet.
Businesses with a longer sales cycle, particularly B2B or higher-value services, often need to start even earlier, since the enquiries that come in during a Christmas campaign might not convert into actual business until January or February.
Where to start
If you already run Google Ads, the sensible first step is a proper look at how last year’s account performed over the same period, if you were running campaigns then — what worked, what the cost per click did as December approached, and where the budget actually went. If you’re starting from scratch or your account hasn’t been reviewed properly in a while, our Google Ads management service is a good place to begin, and if you’d rather set a new account up cleanly for the season ahead, our Google Ads setup service covers exactly that.
Either way, it’s worth doing sooner rather than later. If you’d like a second opinion on where your account stands before the busy months hit, our free Google Ads audit will show you where the budget’s currently going, or you can get in touch and we’ll talk through what a sensible run-up to Christmas would look like for your business.
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