A Three-Day Sale: How to Tell Google Ads to Expect More Sales

You have announced a sale for three days. On day one there are noticeably more orders than usual, while your ad account may carry on as before: the bidding strategy calculates bids from what happened earlier. That is our plain-language explanation, and the help pages do not put it this way. For short events the risk is obvious: by the time the system catches up, the sale is nearly over.

Google Ads has a separate option for this, “seasonality adjustments”. Below we cover what the tool is, when it fits, when it hurts, what it works with and where to find it. Everything about features and menus comes from Google Ads Help pages that we opened and read on 10 November 2026, not from retellings.

What it is, in plain words

A seasonality adjustment is a hint for an automated bidding strategy. You say in advance: on these dates the conversion rate (the share of visitors who buy or leave a request) will change by roughly this many percent. Google’s help describes it as an advanced tool that informs Smart Bidding of expected changes from promotions and sales.

The example from the help itself: you expect conversion rates to rise by 50% during a 3-day sale, so for those 3 days you add up to +50%. Campaigns optimize their bids during the event and return to their previous performance level afterwards. Nothing needs to be rolled back by hand: no negative adjustment is needed when the promotion is over.

How much to enter in your case, the help does not advise: the 50% figure is only an illustration. It is more sensible to base your estimate on your own history: compare how the last sale converted against ordinary days. That is our advice, not a Google rule.

When to use it

For short events with clear dates. According to the help, seasonality adjustments are ideal for short events of 1-7 days. A three-day sale, a one-day promotion, a weekend of discounts, or a product launch announced for a specific day all fit.

There is a second condition: the event has to change conversion noticeably. Google says to use adjustments only if you expect major changes to conversion rates. If you run a five percent discount with no announcement, there will be no peak, so there is nothing to tell the system.

When not to use it

The help gives two warnings here.

First: Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events. So ordinary summer lulls, a pre-holiday rise or weekly swings are tracked by the system without your hints. Our conclusion from this: duplicating obvious seasonality with a manual hint makes no sense.

Second: for long periods the tool may not work as well. The help words it as “more than 14 days at a time”. So a “seasonality adjustment for the whole of December” is an example of how not to use this tool. For events of 8 to 14 days the help gives no clear verdict: it recommends short events and warns about longer ones. Stick to the first and do not stretch the period without need.

Separately: seasonality adjustments are not supported in Travel campaigns.

Which campaigns and strategies it works with

According to the help, availability is as follows:

• Search, Shopping, Demand Gen and Display campaigns, if they use the Target ROAS or Target CPA bid strategy;
• Performance Max and App (beta) campaigns, with all bid strategies.

So if a store runs product ads through Performance Max, the adjustment is available with no condition on strategy. A Search campaign with a different strategy does not fall under this list.

What about manual bidding. The help does not list it among the supported strategies, and it calls the tool a hint for Smart Bidding. There is no direct sentence saying “it does not work with manual bids”, so we do not claim it categorically. Our reading is this: under manual control you decide yourself whether to raise a bid for the sale days, and the adjustment has nothing to do with it.

How to create an adjustment

The path according to the help:

1. In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon, then the Budgets and bidding drop-down, then Adjustments.
2. At the top select the Seasonal option and click the blue plus button.
3. Under “Adjustment type”, select Conversion rate.
4. Give the event a name and fill in its start and end dates.
5. Under “Scope”, choose a campaign type or specific campaigns.
6. Under “Conversion rate adjustment”, enter your estimated change, click Save, then Create seasonality adjustment.

Two practical details from the same page. The help warns that adjustments may change how your bid strategies perform, so check the dates and percentages before creating one. A maximum of 2,000 campaigns can be saved with one event: for large accounts it is easier to pick campaign types. If you run several accounts through a manager account, you can create an adjustment once for all accounts linked at that moment, but new client accounts added later will not inherit it.

Example: Black Friday, 27 November

This year Black Friday falls on 27 November. For a store it is a typical short event: the date is known, demand is expected to differ, and the peak itself fits within “1-7 days”. Here is how it looks in practice.

If your sale runs only on the 27th or, say, from the 26th to the 29th, that is one entry in the Seasonal section for those dates. If discounts run from the start of November to mid-December, that is far longer than 14 days, and for such periods the help does not recommend the tool.

Before launch, run a short check: do the campaigns use one of the strategies listed above; do the dates match the real promotion schedule; do you expect a noticeable jump in conversion rather than a token one. If any answer is “no”, it is better to set nothing.

We covered the overall week-by-week Black Friday preparation in a separate article, what to do in four weeks. Here we stay on the tool itself.

What to do today

1. Write down the dates of your next promotion and how long it lasts. More than 14 days at a time means an adjustment is not your tool.
2. Check which strategies your campaigns use. Search, Shopping and Display need Target ROAS or Target CPA; Performance Max works with any.
3. Compare conversion during your last sale with ordinary days and decide by how many percent you expect it to shift this time.
4. Create the adjustment following the steps above for the promotion dates, no longer.
5. Afterwards, look at the result and write down your conclusion. Nothing needs to be removed, and next time that estimate becomes your own history.

How we set up automated strategies is described in the Performance Max and Shopping ads sections.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads? Leave a request: we will look at which strategies your campaigns use and whether it makes sense to tell them about your sale in advance.