October was a record month for Stepprs. For the business as a whole and for Google Ads. We generated £500,000 in Google Ads revenue alone. But November is crunch time for eCom brands, and we began to wonder, could we hit £1 million in Google Ads revenue?

To add to the challenge, Stepprs were not active on Google Ads during the previous Black Friday. Which meant no historical data, no uplift benchmarks, no proven audiences to remarket to, and no understanding of how their customers behaved during a major sale. This was their first proper Black Friday.

Most Black Friday PPC advice is either too vague or too obvious. Things like “increase budgets” or “prepare early”. At Prime Digital, we try to keep our advice actionable.

This guide breaks down exactly what we did for Stepprs and why it works. It is not a checklist of things everyone must do, or could possibly do. It is, however, a playbook of the actions that made an impact for this brand during their 2025 Black Friday sale period.

Aligning With the Client

Good execution starts with alignment. Get everyone on the same page early. Here is what we needed from Stepprs so that we could properly plan and implement our Black Friday strategy:

• Clear objectives: Stepprs wanted to maximise revenue while maintaining their target ROAS. No budget cap. Other brands may prioritise clearing stock or driving as much revenue as possible within a fixed budget.
• Offer details: Discounts, dates, messaging, and creative direction. It sounds simple, but mistakes here cause chaos. Triple-check everything.
• Creative assets: Black Friday-specific copy, images and videos. We handled the Google Ads copy. Stepprs provided visuals. They have a strong Meta Ads presence and are experts here.
• A landing page: It needs to be clear, focused, and create urgency around the offer.

Campaign Setup

Search Campaigns

We wanted to ensure the ads reflected the urgency and relevance of Black Friday, without disrupting campaign stability. Therefore, we

• Wrote Black Friday-specific headlines and descriptions
• Focused on Black Friday phrasing, clarity around the discount, and urgency
• Uploaded these as a headline and description assets
• Pinned them to ensure they were guaranteed to appear during the sale period

Using pinned assets reduces the instability and chance of human error that comes with swapping entire ads in and out during the Black Friday period. The trade-off is that you cannot use ad customisers like countdown timers, so urgency must come from the messaging itself.

Performance Max Campaigns

For PMax, there’s always a bit of debate as to whether to create new campaigns, new asset groups, or add assets to existing asset groups. We’re yet to hear of a convincing case that one of these should be adopted in all circumstances – as usual, it depends.

Stepprs have one core product. The objective was simply to maximise total revenue. Because of this, we created Black Friday-specific asset groups within the main campaign. The sale period was long enough for Google to learn how to allocate budget correctly across the new and existing groups.

Had we needed to push specific products with dedicated budgets, a separate campaign would have made more sense.

Demand Gen Campaigns

We use Demand Gen exclusively for video. Demand Gen campaigns can take a while to get good momentum, so we took a two-pronged approach:

• Added Black Friday videos to the existing Demand Gen campaign so they could gain immediate traction
• Created dedicated Black Friday retargeting campaigns with Black Friday videos only

This allowed us to benefit from existing learnings while also having clean, tightly targeted retargeting activity.

Merchant Centre & Product Feeds

Feeds matter a lot during Black Friday. Prices and stock levels can change quickly, so you need your feed to be refreshed often.

Pro Tip: If necessary, request the hourly feed refresh option from Google support.

We also added Merchant Centre promotions in all available markets. As with new ads and assets, approvals can take time, so set this up in advance.

Adding Campaign Assets

To maximise visibility and push urgency, we created Black Friday-specific:

• Sitelinks
• Callouts
• Promotions

These followed the same copy principles as the search assets. These can also be a way to test alternate angles, rather than repeating the exact same messaging.

Bid Adjustments

Seasonality adjustments were one of the biggest drivers behind our results.

Black Friday causes a sharp, immediate spike in performance, and Google cannot react quickly enough to this in real time. Without conversion rate seasonality adjustments, your campaigns will hit a strong ROAS, but they will underspend heavily compared with the true opportunity available during the sale.

The best way to determine the optimal conversion rate seasonal adjustment is to look at data from previous years (assuming everything else is comparable). In our case, Stepprs had no previous Black Friday data, so we combined industry benchmarks with uplifts they had seen during other sale periods.

Pro tip: When calculating the % uplift for a conversion rate seasonality adjustment, use the increase in conversion value / clicks, not conversion rate. This metric combines both CVR and AOV. If last year you saw a 50% uplift in CVR but also a 20% uplift in AOV, and you only apply a 50% increase, you will again overshoot ROAS and miss out on additional revenue.

It is also important to set different adjustments based on the strength of each offer and the significance of each date. For Stepprs, we created separate adjustments for:

• The lead up week
• Black Friday
• The weekend
• Cyber Monday

Pro tip: Apply negative conversion rate seasonality adjustments after the sale ends. Stepprs ended their sale on Cyber Monday, so we added negative adjustments for the following few days to prevent overspending at lower ROAS levels. Be careful tho, you don’t want to ‘kill’ your campaign, something between 10% and 30% is usually enough.

Our brand campaigns use manual CPC bidding. If your brand campaigns don’t use mCPC, you should test this approach (it will generally bring in the same revenue at a lower cost). This meant we had to manually increase bids on these campaigns during the sale, with different levels of increases depending on the expected uplift in performance and the increase in competition.

Budget Adjustments

You can also use budget seasonality adjustments to help prevent campaigns from becoming limited by budget during the sale. Annoyingly, Google only lets you increase budgets by a set amount rather than a percentage (seriously, Google) – Not ideal if you manage a large account.

Because most of our campaigns use tROAS and mCPC bidding, we gradually increased budgets ahead of time, as spend would still be capped by the ROAS target or CPC.

Pro tip: If adopting this approach, increase budgets gradually. If you increase budgets too aggressively, Google may stress test the full daily allowance, spending the entire budget at a poor ROAS before it settles back down.

For campaigns using maximise conversion (value), seasonal budget adjustments are a better, cleaner alternative.

Monitoring pacing during the important days matters too. You can use Looker Studio dashboards like this one to check performance by hour and adjust budgets if campaigns were at risk of becoming limited by their budget. Google reps can often provide pre-built dashboard like this on request.

Automated Rules

Once the prep work was finalised, we created automated rules for anything that doesn’t have a built-in schedule. For example, assets, campaigns and seasonal adjustments have built-in start and end dates, but for things like swapping over ads and asset groups, and adjusting CPCs, we used automated rules.

Even with scheduling, we manually checked each activation and deactivation. Timing mistakes during Black Friday are costly, and it is always worth the extra five seconds to confirm.

After Black Friday

• In the days following the sale, we:
• Ensured all Black Friday content was switched off
• Ensured the correct content took over
• Ensured the account had the correct post-sale setup
• Kept an eye on spend and ROAS, in case we need to make any changes to our negative seasonality adjustments

Looking Ahead

Two key advantages we will have next year are:

• Black Friday audiences from this year that we can retarget to
• Real data upon which to base seasonality adjustments

Aside from that, we have insights into the best performing copy, images, videos, campaigns, asset groups etc – so that our setup next year is even more optimised.