On New Year's Day, Google Ads brought me many leads, and almost nobody bought

On Jan. 1, 2021, my ad campaigns were running with a target cost per action (CPA) — that is, a target price for one lead, not for a purchase. I think the target was about 50 hryvnias, a little under $2 at the time. For the whole year the cost stayed roughly the same, and the ads were finding me a small number of people, about 50 a day.

That day, I did not look at my phone. Then at one moment, I checked my phone and saw bank notifications, one after another, 500 hryvnias (about $18) each. A new charge every 20 minutes. I opened the laptop, and there were already messages on Instagram.

As I understood later, and this is only my guess, on Jan. 1 the other advertisers who target this audience switched off their ads. It was as if Google said: "Now I will show you everywhere." It started to run my ads at full power. My target cost per lead was unchanged, and the campaigns appeared to bring in many more leads.

I had about 10 to 15 campaigns with an average budget of about 1,000 to 2,000 hryvnias ($35 to $70) on each one. For a long time it was like this: one campaign spent 1,500 to 2,000, then it dropped to 200. They stayed under 2,000, and they never all used their budgets at the same time. But this time, they all spent it. Plus, Google has one more feature: Its rules say it can spend up to two times your daily budget. So, as I remember it, the larger campaigns spent about 4,000 hryvnias (about $140) each.

One man wrote to me that since the previous night, he had seen only my face everywhere: on his phone, on his tablet, on his TV. This had never happened before.

I got many leads, and almost none of them bought. I no longer have the account reports for that day, so I can't say exactly how many. These were really leads, not purchases. When I made it so that we pass purchases to Google, everything started to get better.

Google can spend twice your daily budget

In practice, for most campaigns, Google can spend up to two times your daily budget. Google has this property, and it is written in Google Ads Help (as of October 2026), with some exceptions. On a single day, it can spend two times your budget, but for the month you will not be charged more than 30.4 times your average daily budget. So if you set a budget of $100 a day and keep it all month, tomorrow Google can charge up to $200, but for the month you will not be charged more than $3,040.

This is normal. Business works in waves, and Google works in waves. In my experience, when you stop campaigns by hand, you choke a car that has picked up speed, and you usually make it worse for yourself.

The same sum and far fewer results

An advertiser once wrote to me that his campaign always ran on Maximize conversions and that in general everything was OK. I asked how long it had been running that way. He said about two months. Then I told him: Wait for any public holiday, and you may be shocked by what starts to happen.

When new players come in on Black Friday and during sales, Google can just start to drain your money. In the worst cases I have seen, the same sum brought far fewer results. It would be logical just to lower the budget at this time: "I don't need leads at all on these days."

Maximize conversions is risky in moments of sharp market changes when a new competitor comes in. For example, you have a budget of $1,000, and on average you pay $50 per conversion, so you get 20 conversions. Then some new competitor comes in and sets wild prices per click. All prices jump, and for the same $1,000 you may get not 20 conversions at $50, but only a few, or even one. If you had a target CPA of $50, Google would try to keep the average cost near $50. It can't promise this, and a single conversion can still cost more than $50, because the target is an average, not a ceiling.

That is why in the long term I always work with a clear target CPA.

What to check before the holidays

An offline conversion is a target action that happens not on your website, but, for example, in your store or when a person talks to your manager. With offline conversions, Google Ads can optimize not just for the people who leave a request, but for the people who pay you money. When you send data about offline conversions, you can also give a value to each conversion, for example, $5,000.

If on some holidays there is a lot of traffic but almost nobody buys, you should know there is a tool that lets you tell Google in advance how much and on which dates your conversion rate will change. It is called seasonality adjustments. To locate it, go to Tools, Budgets and bidding, then Adjustments, Seasonal. Google says to use it only if you expect major changes in conversion rates, ideally for short events of one to seven days, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events.

Should you pause Google Ads on holidays?

Whenever a question like this comes up, I ask: Do you want to do this because there are reasons to do it or because you just heard it somewhere? If you just heard somewhere that you need to pause Google Ads on holidays, that alone is not a reason.

In some of the businesses I launch where Google gets purchase data, Jan. 1 is one of the most effective days for ads. I think it is because many advertisers stop that day. In those businesses, I have sometimes set a double or triple budget on Jan. 1.

It is not like this everywhere. In my online school's Google Ads account, I compared each Jan. 1 with the average day of Dec. 20 to 30 before it. A registration on our website cost less on Jan. 1 in 2023 ($1.38 against $1.84) and in 2025 ($3.38 against $6.29), and about the same in 2024 ($5.22 against $5.28). In autumn 2025, we changed what we count. Since then, the conversion has been a lead that our team confirmed in our customer relationship management (CRM) system and uploaded back to Google Ads. On Jan. 1, 2026, clicks went up 58%, to 1,061 from an average of 670, but there were two leads instead of about 3.5, and each cost $126 instead of $60. In none of these years did the school spend twice its average December day on Jan. 1.

How I counted: I took every campaign that spent money in the account on those days on YouTube, Demand Gen, Search and Performance Max. For Jan. 1, I divided that day's spend by its conversions. For Dec. 20 to 30, I divided the total spend by the total conversions. For 2023 to 2025, I counted only website registrations, not email confirmations, webinar visits or purchases. For 2026, I counted only leads confirmed in the CRM. Because the conversion changed, I compare each Jan. 1 only with the December just before it, not one year with another.

If you have your own data that tells you personally that on past holidays a lot of money was spent with zero efficiency, that is different. Everyone has an individual situation. If efficiency was bad, analyze why it was bad and what the reasons were. But don't stop for the sake of stopping.

This article was first published on Featured News.