Why we prepare Glowember in summer

glow25 is a D2C health and beauty brand with collagen powder as its main line, the market leader in the German collagen segment and active in several European markets beyond the DACH region. The collagen segment has become crowded in recent years: new providers are entering the market, the advertising messages resemble each other, and in November everyone reaches for similar discount mechanics. In this market, growth goes to whoever has the cleanest setup behind the scenes.

Since April 2025, we have been responsible for glow25’s performance on Google Ads across all campaign lines: brand, generic and Demand Gen. The collaboration runs on a tight rhythm, with daily management in the account and fixed weekly reporting to the glow25 team. This rhythm is more than a formality. It is the reason a sale month like Glowember can be actively managed instead of merely observed.

Glowember, the sale season around Black Friday, is glow25’s most important sale window of the year. A significant share of the annual business is decided around Black Friday, and the entire competition in the collagen segment fights for the same attention in November with similar discount mechanics. Click prices rise, auctions get crowded, and anyone who only starts in October loses visibility at exactly the moment it is most expensive and most valuable.

A sale of this size cannot be pieced together at short notice. The campaign structure, the discount logic and the new-customer target have to be in place before the first click gets expensive. A setup that only takes shape during the peak spends the most expensive week of the year in the learning phase instead of delivering. Major changes to campaign structure, bidding strategy or target values can trigger temporary learning and adjustment phases, so we wanted to avoid such interventions during the peak as far as possible.

That is why the work starts in summer, well ahead of the six weeks before the peak. In concrete terms: the offer logic for the whole of November is planned in advance, the budget framework and the new-customer target are agreed with the client, the campaign structure is prepared for the expected load, and the assets are produced with enough lead time for feedback loops and approvals. When November arrives, the building is done and the focus is on steering.

In July, Black Friday planning feels too early for everyone involved. The effort comes months before the result, and you are planning for a window that still seems far away. The fact that glow25 consistently commits to this lead time and documents the planning centrally, rather than through ad-hoc calls, is half the battle.

Instead of spreading the discount evenly across the whole month, we staggered it. The discount increased gradually through November and only reached its maximum over Black Weekend, the time of highest purchase intent. This keeps the urgency alive all month without giving away the best margin in the first week.

A sale that runs at the same discount level for four weeks wears out. The first days perform, then the curve flattens because undecided shoppers lack a reason to buy now rather than later. A rising scale reverses this logic: those who buy early buy out of conviction, and those who hesitate get new reasons to buy throughout the month. Black Weekend remains the moment everything builds towards.

The real trick lay in the execution: the sale URL stayed the same all month, and only the product focus and discount level changed. This meant we did not have to set up a new campaign for every discount tier, which would have had to relearn during the hottest phase of the year. The campaigns simply kept running with a stable learning phase, without a dip in performance at the next discount step. New ads only went live where the offer actually increased.

For 2025, the goal was clearly defined, if uncomfortable: significantly more new customers, well beyond simply more revenue. Anyone who wins new customers aggressively through non-brand usually pays for it in efficiency. New audiences do not know the brand yet, and they convert less often and at higher cost than existing customers, who come through brand search anyway. More reach rarely means more ROAS.

For a brand like glow25, this bet is still the right one. A sale window like Glowember is the moment of the year when the barrier to a first purchase is lowest: the attention is there, the discount lowers the risk, and anyone who has tried the product once can become a returning customer. Optimising for short-term efficiency in this window is a false economy.

In the end, ROAS was 13% below the previous year. That was a strategic decision in favour of new-customer growth, agreed with the client before the season, and control was never lost. With +134% new customers and +170% new-customer revenue, it was the right bet. What matters is that the calculation is made together beforehand, instead of being explained afterwards.

A sale of this size pushes any campaign structure to its limits. Budgets multiply overnight, the auctions are full, and the algorithm has to deal with volumes of data that never occur in normal operation. If the structure is only in place by November, it spends the peak sorting itself out instead of bringing in revenue.

That is why the separation of brand and non-brand, the budget logic and the bidding strategy were in place before the sale. Brand captures the demand the sale generates anyway, and non-brand carries the new-customer target. Anyone who lumps brand and non-brand together cannot tell at the end whether the new-customer investment worked or whether existing customers simply bought sooner. Managing them separately let us allocate budgets more precisely and keep potential overlaps under better control.

During the peak, the budget follows performance and leaves the summer plan behind. Where the targets hold, we add more; where they break, we reallocate. This only works if the structure can absorb these shifts without relearning each time. A calm setup at peak is a necessity, because it is what makes fast reactions possible in the first place.

By default, Shopping campaigns lead to the regular product detail page. For everyday business, that is perfectly fine. In a sale, it creates a break: someone searching in discount mode lands on a neutral product page that knows nothing about the promotion and has to re-establish the sale context themselves. Every open question costs attention at exactly the moment when purchase intent is highest.

On top of that, search intent shifts in November. People search for the product on sale as well as for the product itself, adding terms such as deal, discount or Black Friday directly to their query. These are the most valuable searches of the year, because behind them lies an almost finished purchase decision. That makes it all the more costly to drop these users on a page that does not answer their question.

For Kollagen Intensiv, one of glow25’s strongest products, we therefore set up a dedicated sale page in Shopping in the middle of the running peak, built for the discount search intent: the promotion is visible immediately, the price advantage is clear and the path to the basket is short. We added dedicated brand ad groups for the matching sale search terms. This makes sale demand individually controllable and individually readable, with its own bids and its own analysis.

The sale page played a major part in turning the expensively acquired demand at peak into revenue and new customers. It creates the consistency that matters: between search intent, ad and landing page. A strong peak setup consists of more than budgets, bids and offers.

Preparation alone does not win the sale; it makes the sale manageable. In November itself, the account was managed more closely than in normal operation: a daily look at pacing and target achievement per campaign line, clear thresholds for when to intervene, and short lines to the client when a decision was needed. Not every deviation is an alarm, but every deviation was spotted and assessed on the same day.

The landing-page lever was not in the plan on day one. It emerged in the middle of the peak, because the daily management specifically looked for places where search intent and landing page could fit together even better. Observations like this never show up in a weekly report. The sale page itself comes from glow25; the insight into where it has the most impact in the channel comes from daily work in the account.

These figures are the result of collaboration, and no one achieved them alone. glow25 understands its brand, its product and its community better than any agency ever could. Our job is the push and the speed of reaction in the channel, and both only work when both sides are working from the same plan early on.

Both sides contribute their craft, the bet on new-customer growth is decided together and in advance, and during the peak the same person looks at the account every day instead of a changing rotation. In the end, the result does not need to explain how the ROAS came about: it was discussed beforehand.

November 2025 against November 2024, same account: +95% revenue, +134% new customers and +170% new-customer revenue. Black Friday itself became the highest-revenue day in the company’s history. ROAS was deliberately 13% below the previous year, in favour of new-customer growth.

The staggered offer on one fixed sale URL works and belongs in the setup from the start. The new-customer bet is decided in advance, well before November. What emerged on the landing page during live operation in 2025 goes into the setup from the start in 2026: sale landing pages for the lead products are prepared before the sale, and matching search intent with the landing page becomes a fixed part of the daily peak routine.