Optimising your Performance Max campaigns for the holiday season
ARTICLE By the Google Shopping (CSS) Team l Expertise Series [December 2023]
With the increase in consumer activity and the heightened anticipation of the holiday season, optimising your Performance Max campaigns and making sure they capture the attention of eager shoppers can help you maximise your return on investment.
We’ve packed this comprehensive guide with valuable tips, actionable strategies and consumer trends to help you understand how people shop and, crucially, how to get the most out of your campaigns.
1. Holiday shopping consumer trends
Broadly speaking, there are four approaches consumers take during the holiday season.1&2
(44%) – Early birds start shopping early in the season, often before Thanksgiving, to avoid the rush and take advantage of early bird sales.
(26%) – Spreaders shop across the season, searching out the perfect gifts and taking advantage of sales from the beginning of the holiday season to its end.
(18%) – Sale-seekers wait until the last minute to shop, even if it means shopping in crowded stores, to get the best deals possible.
(12%) – Last-minute shoppers wait until the very last minute to shop, often procrastinating and shopping online to avoid crowds.
Last year, 70% of shopping-related search volume containing ‘Black Friday’ happened before the day itself.3
In essence, this means shopping interest is being spread over a longer period than in previous years, as you can see in the graph below.
Source2: 2020-2022 peak consumer demand, from 'Peak year 2023, CSS Practitioner Narrative', shared by Google with CSS Partners
2. Optimisation tips for your Performance Max campaigns
Understanding how your consumers shop during the holiday season is the first step in creating effective Shopping campaigns that achieve your objectives. The next step is tailoring your campaigns – and this is where Performance Max can make a significant impact.
By considering every stage of your customer’s journey,Performance Max Insightscan help you spot trends and better understand your campaign performance. This can help you build better peak-specific campaigns and make more informed decisions on bidding and budgets, audience signals and custom segments.
A. General Performance Max best practices
Whether you’re setting up your first Performance Max campaign or your fiftieth, these best practices will help give your campaign its best chance of success:
Every new Performance Max campaign – flash or peak specific – should run for at least 7 days.
If possible, launch campaigns 2-3 weeks in advance to ramp up efficiently.
Use Maximise Conversion / Max Conv. Value without ROAS target for best short-term performance.
B. Peak-specific campaigns
To prioritise certain products during peak season, create a separate Performance Max and/or standard Shopping campaign with specific ROAS targets and budget.
C. Bidding and budgets
Setting the right budget is essential for reaching customers during seasonal shopping moments because it determines how often and where your ads will be shown. Following the tips below can help you set the right budget and bidding strategy for your campaign:
Start adjusting your campaigns 4-6 weeks leading up to peak holiday periods to capture increasing demand.
Gradually update bids and budgets (30% increments) before a major seasonal event (Boxing Day) to ease ramp-up.
Avoid constraining your budget for campaigns with an ROI target. If you see a constrained budget flag on your campaign, raise your budget.
Set the ROI goal to at least the past 30-day historical account average.
Audience signals in Performance Max help advertisers accelerate the campaign ramp-up period while steering Google’s AI targeting technology without limiting the campaign’s reach. Applying the following tips can assist you in establishing the right audience signals:
Use the audience manager to find your top in-market and affinity segments.
Add your main target audience.
Use first-party audiences and/or custom segments for best results.
Remember: The most important audience lists and segments to add as audience signals in Performance Max are remarketing, custom audiences and customer match.
E. Custom Segments
To make sure your campaign connects with the best audience, custom segments uses Performance Max’s built-in AI to pick a target demographic based on one of three factors: reach, consideration or performance:
Reach shows your ads to as many people who are interested in your products as possible.
Consideration shows your ads to people who are already familiar with your products and are considering making a purchase.
Performance shows your ads to people who are most likely to buy your products.
This holiday season, we’ll be with you every step of the way. If you need more support, feel free to reach out to your Google Shopping (CSS) team.
