Peak Season: Setting up your Shopping campaigns for success

Audiences

• Review your audience sources and add all relevant remarketing and similar audience lists to your Shopping campaigns. Gathering relevant data during peak events allows you to connect business data with advertising in a meaningful way.
• Don’t forget to refresh your Customer Match lists if you haven’t done so in the past 90 days. Having up-to-date and accurate first-party data is becoming increasingly important for businesses to get insightful reporting.

Keywords and inventory filters

• Review your negative keywords, if any, as well as your inventory filters (in campaign settings) to ensure these are not preventing your ads from being displayed on strategic queries. You’ll have higher chances of capturing dynamic and uncommon queries by having a broader and more generic approach to your keyword selection.

Shopping campaign structure

Google Ads and Merchant Center offer several reporting options to help you segment key products from low volume SKUs:

• For the products that bring you the majority of your traffic, you can create a dedicated campaign for peak season, ideally a  Smart Shopping campaign. For lower volume items, try to ensure they are being targeted by a catch-all campaign, using a combination of low priority and low bids.

Budgets

Review your budget allocation and strategy, making sure your Shopping campaigns have sufficient funds to meet the rising query demand:

• One tactic you can follow is to reallocate your Shopping campaigns with a budget surplus to campaigns constrained by budget. You can also review the campaigns’ status and Search Lost Impression Share due to budget (columns), which indicate if your campaigns are limited by budget, as well as the percentage of times your ads weren’t shown due to insufficient budget within the last 14 days.

Tip: Check the Recommendations tab for budget-related opportunities.

• We advise you to set up automated budget alerts to get notifications of missing traffic in high-volume periods. You can easily schedule these by setting up automated rules.

OptiScore

• Keep track of the 'Bidding & Budgets' opportunities added to your Shopping campaigns. These appear in the OptiScore tool in your Google Ads account and help you to identify, prioritise and deploy bidding optimisations scalably. These recommendations are updated, personalised and actionable; they are only shown to you at relevant times based on the current market dynamics and your specific Shopping campaigns’ settings.

Target ROAS (tROAS)

• If leveraging tROAS, you can adjust your Shopping campaigns objectives according to your efficiency and volume expectations.

Tip: Remember that rebalancing your expected return is the easiest way to scale your campaigns effectively.

• Consider transitioning your key inventory to Smart Shopping campaigns, which use a more sophisticated automation solution and maximise conversion value.

Smart Shopping campaigns

If you’re already using Smart Shopping campaigns, we recommend that you always adjust budgets to enhance scalability and reach.

Tips:

1. Add high quality images to your ad creative.
2. Adjust your text for generic display ads to include offers.
3. Select main and accent colours.
4. Try out new features such as video to help increase overall reach and impressions.

Feed policy

• Our main recommendation for preventing disapprovals and suspensions in your account is to revise and follow the Shopping ads policies and product data specification requirements. By increasing your eligible offers, you are improving  your chances of maximising coverage on rising queries and trends during peak.
• If your item is disapproved, then you can contact Google Ads Support. You can use the chat or phone for urgent matters, while for more complex issues, you can use email support. When you contact Google’s support channels, make sure you have your Google Ads ID and admin details ready and keep the Case ID for future reference.

Product feed optimisation

• You can keep your product data updated by leveraging automatic item updates for price and availability, and opt-in to automatic image improvements to automatically improve and/or fix your uploaded images.
• We advise you to use the 'sale_price' attribute and/or the promotion tab to showcase your special prices.
• Make sure to use the correct wording in your product titles, descriptions and 'product-type' attributes for seasonal items, adapting some of the most important product features for peak-related queries.

We hope that these tips and recommendations will help you get your peak Shopping campaigns set up for success and eventually achieve your business goals. As always, preparation is key. With the right strategy and a mature Shopping campaign set-up, you’ll be able to capture more opportunities of the auction dynamics, enhance your reach and target the right audience at the right time.