The Christmas decorations are down, and you’re back at your desk with a fresh cup of coffee and the question “how did my Google Ads really perform over the festive period?”

January is the perfect time to roll up your sleeves and conduct a proper PPC audit. Your campaigns have just been through one of the busiest trading periods of the year, and the data you’ve collected is gold dust for setting yourself up for Q1 success. But where do you start?

The key is knowing what to look for and, more importantly, what to do about it. Let’s walk through the three areas you need to review to make sure your campaigns are firing on all cylinders for the year ahead.

TLDR

1. Review Your Conversion Data and Attribution

What to look at: Start by comparing your conversion data from December against your typical monthly performance. Look beyond just the conversion numbers themselves and dig into which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords actually drove those conversions. Pay particular attention to your attribution window, especially if you run longer sales cycles or saw an uptick in research behaviour before Christmas.

How this helps you succeed in Q1: Understanding what actually worked over Christmas means you can double down on winning strategies right from January. If certain product categories or services massively outperformed others, you’ll want to shift budget accordingly before your competitors catch on. More importantly, if you spot tracking discrepancies or attribution problems now, you can fix them before Q1 data becomes unreliable. There’s nothing worse than making budget decisions in February based on dodgy data from January.

January and February often see different user behaviour than December, people are more price-conscious, more research-focused, and less impulsive. By understanding your festive performance, you can adjust your messaging, bidding strategies, and budget allocation to match the Q1 mindset rather than just carrying over December’s settings.

2. Audit Your Automated Campaigns and AI-Driven Features

What to look at: Review your Bidding strategies across all campaigns. Did your target ROAS or target CPA campaigns actually hit their targets over the busy period or did your Manual CPC drop in top of page bids? Sometimes automated bidding can go a bit haywire when conversion volumes spike or drop dramatically, so check whether you need to adjust those targets for the quieter Q1 period and with manual CPC, make sure you are adjusting bids according to top of page and first page to be competitive.

Also, if you are running broad match keywords with smart bidding, are you appearing for relevant searches, or has the algorithm drifted into expensive irrelevance?

How this helps you succeed in Q1: Adjust your target ROAS or CPA to reflect Q1’s typically different conversion rates and customer values. Think of it this way: AI is brilliant at optimisation, but it needs human direction. Your January audit is where you set the guard rails so the algorithms work for you, not against you.

3. Analyse Your Ad Creative and Messaging Performance

What to look at: Go through your responsive search ads and look at which headlines and descriptions actually resonated during December. Google’s asset performance ratings (Poor, Good, Best) give you a starting point, but also look at the ad combinations that appeared most frequently for your top-performing campaigns. Check your assets, did your promotion extensions with “Christmas Sale” messaging keep running into January when they should have been paused?

Are your sitelink extensions still pointing to a “Gift Guide” page that’s no longer relevant?. If you ran video or display campaigns, review which creative actually drove action versus which just looked pretty. Look at your click-through rates, view rates, and most importantly, whether those clicks converted.

How this helps you succeed in Q1: Your December ad creative was probably festive, urgent, and gift-focused. That’s not what people want to hear in January. Post-Christmas shoppers are often motivated by different things: New Year goals, sales and discounts, self-improvement, or simply replacing something that broke over the holidays. By reviewing what performed well structurally (not just thematically), you can keep the high-performing elements whilst updating the messaging for Q1.

Maybe your “Last-minute Christmas gifts” headline crushed it, but “Quick delivery on [product]” could work just as well in January with a different angle. Refreshing your ad creative now also gives you a Quality Score boost. Google rewards relevant, up-to-date ads, and there’s nothing less relevant than Christmas messaging in February. Update now, and you’ll likely see better ad positions and lower CPCs as a result. Plus, if you spotted any ad creative that genuinely underperformed, cutting it now means your budget goes further on what actually works.

Your Q1 Action Plan

The post-Christmas period is hands-down the best time to audit your Google Ads account. You’ve got fresh data, quieter trading conditions that allow for testing, and a clean slate for the year ahead. Focus your audit on these three areas, conversion data, automated campaigns, and ad creative, and you’ll spot the opportunities and issues that matter most. Do this properly, and whilst your competitors are sleepwalking through January with December’s settings still running, you’ll be set up for a strong Q1 with campaigns that are optimised, relevant, and ready to perform.