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Consumer demand spread across peak season
Holiday shopping begins weeks before the actual peak period starts. In 2022, UK shoppers had already done a quarter of their holiday shopping by mid-October.1 Around 40% of holiday shoppers express that their previous holiday shopping experiences have influenced them start their shopping much earlier for various occasions throughout the year.2 This implies that the traditional seasonality of shopping has shifted, to a more continuous, seasonal approach, resulting in holiday shoppers planning well in advance for all occasions like cold-weather essentials or hosting supplies for parties and gatherings.
Source: 2020-2022 peak consumer demand, from 'Peak year 2023, CSS Practitioner Narrative', shared by Google with CSS Partners 3
To make the most of these opportunities and capture a larger share of holiday shoppers, prepare your campaigns to connect with early consumers:
Ensure you have enough budget as early as possible to capture the beginning of the customer’s shopping journey.
Consider a peak-specific campaign structure to prioritise certain types of products with specific ROAS targets and budgets.
2023 peak trends and what they mean for your campaigns
Consumers are becoming more intentional about their spending: In a recent study, 80% of holiday shoppers said they researched before making a purchase, compared to only 20% who said they made purchases on impulse.4 On top of that, shoppers no longer focus only on finding the cheapest deals; they prioritise value, quality, and customer service.5 Searches for “cheap and best” have grown globally by over 40%.6 This means retailers must find fresh ways to offer relevant value to consumers – and communicate it in their Shopping campaigns.
Embrace the change: Consumers move across digital, physical, virtual and social platforms, switching seamlessly between browsing, researching and buying. They discover products and services while scrolling social feeds, watching streaming videos and playing video games. To reach consumers, retailers need to be more agile than ever. AI-powered solutions, like Performance Max, can help maximise performance across Google channels by targeting the right consumers and automating tasks, like bidding and budget allocation.
Best practices to succeed this peak season
1. Optimisation tips for your Performance Max campaigns
By considering every stage of your customer's journey, Performance Max can automatically serve the right ad at the right time, helping you reach more customers and driving more conversions. Advertisers using Performance Max get over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action.7 By identifying and predicting interest in your offering, Performance Max insights can help you spot trends and better understand your campaign performance. This can inform better decisions that improve your results.
Consider a peak-specific campaign structure
To prioritise certain products during peak season, create a separate Performance Max and/or standard Shopping campaign with specific ROAS targets and budget.
For example:
REMEMBER: Starting a new Performance Max campaign over two weeks before the promotion begins gives the tool enough time to learn where best to serve your ads.
Create a new asset group for your specific promotion
Set a lower ROAS target than your current campaigns to help you maximise visibility for these products in the weeks leading up to peak periods when many people are browsing.
Communicate your peak offers clearly by adding a separate asset group promoting your stock
Source: Peak year 2023, CSS Practitioner Narrative, shared by Google with CSS Partners 3
Leverage your creative assets for better peak demand
Use Extension Scheduling (under ‘Advanced Options’): This tool allows you to control when the extensions show.
Show dates: In addition to scheduling extensions, use “promotion dates” to let your customers know the dates your promotions are valid.
Use occasion labels: When it makes sense, select an occasion label to maximise prominence.
Add at the account level: If possible, add promotion extensions to the account level to ensure coverage across all your campaigns.
To make sure you’re up-to-speed on Performance Max, check out our latest Google Shopping (CSS) Performance Max playbook.
2. Recommendations for bids and budgets
Setting up the right bidding strategy and budgets for the peak season can help your campaigns achieve your goals.
Optimise your bids with cross-channel bidding:
Set adequate daily budgets and ROI targets:
- If you see a constrained budget flag on your campaign, raise your budget until you’re no longer limited.
- Set the ROI goal to at least the past 30-day historical average, adjusting for conversion delay.
- Take recommendations from Optimisation Score to understand upcoming changes and seasonality trends that may require you to change your bidding or move unused budgets.
- Use Performance Planner to plan budgets and bids and forecast predicted performance.
3. Feed health reminders
The Google Merchant Center feed is the backbone of your Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. The quality of data you include in your feed is a key success factor for driving high campaign performance. Structure your holiday-season Shopping campaigns and achieve higher performance through feed optimisation and improved query matching:
Get your products live by fixing both account and item-level Merchant Center warnings and including all mandatory and recommended attributes in your feed.
Match your products to user queries by improving feed fundamentals, such as titles and descriptions, and provide offer details using additional attributes.
Maximise performance by adding custom labels to better structure your campaigns to push seasonal items.
Inform users of available discounts by using 'sale_price' attribute or Merchant Center promotions.
Review your shipping and returns offerings and update them accordingly on your GMC account.
Keep your inventory and prices fresh with automatic updates.
Optimising your feed with feed rules
Feed Rules allow you to configure simple data transformation from your feed and extract the full potential of your data at scale.
Why use feed rules?
If you need more support as you prepare for peak season, reach out to your Google Shopping (CSS) team.
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