BFCM Google Ads Prep Checklist: What to Check 23 Days Out

Last verified: 2026-11-04, against Google Ads Help: About seasonality adjustments, Use data exclusions for conversion data outages, About the ad review process, About promotion assets, About overdelivery and your average daily budget, and Merchant Center Help: Request a review of your issues.

The Brief

• Black Friday is Friday, November 27, 2026, and Cyber Monday is November 30. That's 23 days from today, which is the last comfortable window to fix anything that needs Google's review time.
• Review queues are the hidden deadline. Google says most ads are reviewed within one business day, but Merchant Center says reviews of account and product issues may take up to 7 business days.
• Seasonality adjustments are for short spikes only. Google calls them ideal for 1 to 7 day events and warns they may not work as well beyond 14 days.
• Plan for a broken tag before it happens. Know how data exclusions work now, so you aren't reading help pages on Black Friday morning.

The worst BFCM problems usually aren't strategy problems. They're a disapproved best-seller, a conversion tag that broke in a last-minute site update, or a budget that ran out early on the biggest day of the year. All of them are cheaper to catch in early November.

Here's the checklist we'd run 23 days out, in the order we'd run it.

1. Conversion tracking: test it now, then freeze it

Smart Bidding spends your BFCM budget based on the conversions it sees. If the purchase tag double-fires, or a checkout redesign quietly dropped it, bidding optimizes toward the wrong signal on your most expensive days.

Check: run a real test purchase (or lead) end to end and confirm it lands in Google Ads with the right value. Make sure only the actions you'd actually pay for are set as primary.

Then: agree with whoever owns the site that tags don't change between now and December 1 without telling the ads team.

2. Know your data exclusion plan before you need it

If conversion tracking breaks mid-event, Google's fix is a data exclusion: it helps reduce the impact of bad conversion data on Smart Bidding. A few rules from Google's help page are worth knowing in advance:

• Exclusion dates apply to clicks, so extend the start date back by your conversion delay. Google says it's best practice to exclude at least 90% of clicks tied to the bad data.
• Apply it as soon as you spot the problem, and don't remove it once it's applied.
• If you know about an outage ahead of time (like scheduled site maintenance), you can set the exclusion proactively. Future-dated exclusions typically take effect within a day.
• Data exclusions aren't meant for frequent or long use, and they aren't supported in Hotel and Travel campaigns.
• Even with an exclusion, Google says to expect some performance fluctuation.

Check: write down who can create a data exclusion in each account (they can also be applied from a manager account), and who decides when to use one.

3. Merchant Center: fix disapprovals while there's still review time

For Shopping and Performance Max with a product feed, a disapproved best-seller is invisible during the week it matters most, and Google notes your ads may not show while your account or products are under review. Merchant Center Help says reviews may take up to 7 business days, at both account and item level. Approved products become eligible to show within 24 hours.

Check: open the Needs attention tab on the Products page, then work through the products that sold best last BFCM first. Fix them, request reviews now, and keep big feed changes out of the final week of November.

4. Ads, assets and landing pages: submit early

Google says most ads are reviewed within one business day, but complex reviews take longer, and changes to an ad or asset restart the review. If an ad has been under review for more than 2 full business days, Google says to check its status; after more than a week, contact support.

Google's own advice for a launch date: submit the ad several days in advance and pause it until launch. Paused ads are reviewed just like active ones. A new landing page has to be complete for the ad to be reviewed.

Check: build the BFCM ads, sale landing pages and sitelinks now, paused, so they're approved well before November 27.

5. Promotion assets: set dates, not reminders

Promotion assets include Black Friday and Cyber Monday occasions, both eligible from October 15 to December 15, and you can narrow the dates under Advanced options. Three rules worth checking:

• Occasion promotion assets are preferred over non-occasion promotion assets at the same level.
• The most specific level wins: ad group over campaign, campaign over account.
• Occasion-specific promotion assets must be created or edited within 6 months of their start date to be eligible to serve. Ones that haven't been modified for 6 months stop serving automatically, so don't assume last year's Black Friday promotion will just come back.

Check: create the promotion with the real discount and real end date, and make sure an old, generic promotion at a more specific level isn't overriding it.

6. Budgets: plan for the month, not the day

Google says a campaign can spend up to 2x its average daily budget on a given day, but no more than 30.4x the average daily budget over the month. That flexibility helps on Black Friday, but the monthly cap is tied to your average daily budget, so plan the whole month's spend, not just the peak days.

Check: agree on the BFCM budget with the client or finance now, decide which campaigns get it, and decide who can raise it on the day and by how much.

7. Seasonality adjustments: only for the spike

Seasonality adjustments tell Smart Bidding to expect a conversion-rate change during a future event like a sale. Google's guidance is specific:

• Use them only if you expect a major conversion-rate change, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events.
• They're ideal for 1 to 7 days, and may not work as well for more than 14 days at a time.
• They're available for Search, Shopping, Demand Gen and Display campaigns on Target CPA or Target ROAS, plus Performance Max and App (beta) campaigns on all bid strategies. They aren't supported in Travel campaigns.
• No negative adjustment is needed after the event; campaigns return to their pre-adjustment performance.
• Manager accounts can apply one adjustment across linked client accounts, but client accounts added later don't inherit it.

Check: if you plan one, base the conversion-rate estimate on your own last-year data, and scope it to the campaigns that actually run the sale.

8. Alerts: decide what "wrong" looks like before the weekend

BFCM weekend is when nobody is looking at accounts at 11 p.m. Decide now which signals deserve a ping: conversions dropping while spend keeps going, spend far off plan, a campaign that stops running, ads going disapproved or limited, and budget-limited campaigns on Black Friday itself.

How DetectivePPC flags this

DetectivePPC's monitoring compares your account's most recent day with your last audit and flags a conversions drop, a CPA spike, a spend drop, a ROAS decline, budget-limited campaigns (impression share lost to budget), and campaigns that were active at your last audit but are no longer running. The audit itself checks for disapproved or limited ads and conversion action hygiene. It doesn't replace checking Merchant Center product statuses yourself.

The 23-day BFCM checklist

Want the full account-level version? Grab our free Google Ads Audit Checklist.

FAQ

When is Black Friday 2026? Friday, November 27, 2026. Cyber Monday is Monday, November 30.

Should I use a seasonality adjustment for the whole of November? Google's guidance says no: they're meant for short events of 1 to 7 days, and Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events.

What if my conversion tracking breaks during BFCM? Fix the tag, then apply a data exclusion covering the affected clicks (including your conversion delay) as soon as possible, and leave it in place.

How long does Merchant Center take to review a fixed product? Merchant Center Help says reviews may take up to 7 business days. Approved products become eligible to show within 24 hours.