Best practices for your feed in peak 2022

A. One to two months before peak: Get your campaigns ready for the peak events and confirm your promotions strategy.

Tips on how to achieve this:

• Focus on feed hygiene and fix item warnings and disapprovals.

• Add seasonal custom labels like ‘Christmas’, ‘Black Friday’, ‘Sale’, and ‘best seller’.

• Look at your trending categories and best sellers report on product insights to help inform your sales strategy.

• Keep inventory and prices fresh with automatic item updates.

B. Two to three weeks before peak: Ramp up your promotions strategy.

• Familiarise yourself with promotions to ensure smooth promotional launches.

• Resolve open questions with the support team as soon as possible. Consider sharing your promotional calendar with your Google Shopping (CSS) Team to get support on feed optimisation.

C. During the peak event: Be ready to adjust in real time, track data, and fix any issues that may arise.

• Evaluate your promotional performance to understand what resonates best with your audience.

• Keep content on your landing page consistent for all locations.

• Ensure your pages are stable to prevent item disapprovals and avoid blocking traffic from specific locations; that way Google’s web crawler – Googlebot – can check your website worldwide.

A. Ensure your data is consistent

Step 1: Check your product feed setup

• Upload your new feeds at least 3-5 business days prior to the sales event.

Key tip: Remember that it can take up to 72 hours for your feed to be crawled after it has been submitted for an initial review. Therefore, we recommend giving it ample lead time for the products to be ready to serve.

• Update your product feed regularly to ensure information is consistent with the landing page.

• Check Googlebot’s crawling capabilities to ensure that Google can crawl your landing page content or images successfully, so that your products will be eligible to show.

Step 2: Optimise your product feed content

• Make sure you’ve enough product capacity. If you see a warning about exceeding account capacity, you can request additional quota.
• Merchant promotions are usually reviewed within the same day after uploading, but we recommend submitting them up to 72 hours before your sale launch.
• Fix disapprovals and update your data as soon as possible.

Step 3: Get your website ready

• Make sure your landing page content is the same regardless of viewer locations.

• We recommend you do any structural changes to your website earlier, up to weeks before the sale. This is to ensure you’ve a stable landing page during the peak and to avoid any product disapprovals.

B. Stand out by leveraging feed annotations

Annotations are additional information on Shopping Ads that highlight characteristics shoppers may be looking for and could get a higher visibility and clickthrough rate (CTR). Annotations can be information on price drops, free shipping, product ratings, and more. During a peak or sale period, it’s important to leverage some of these to highlight your special offerings to customers. However, please note that some annotations can be automatic, while others have to be set up to show. (See example below.)

Make sure to highlight your sales or promotions for incremental results. Competitively-priced products is one of the most important components that tend to drive better performance and steadily grow conversions. Keep your product price and availability data fresh during the peak and highlight them to your customers.

There are two key options to highlight price discounts: through sale price or through merchant promotions. Running promotions on your Shopping ads can offer an average 28% uplift in conversion rate.³ 

Check our table below with more tips on the topic: