Optimising your Performance Max campaigns for the holiday season

Broadly speaking, there are four approaches consumers take during the holiday season.^1&2

Source²: 2020-2022 peak consumer demand, from 'Peak year 2023, CSS Practitioner Narrative', shared by Google with CSS Partners

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 Insights can 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.
• Use Performance Planner and optimisation score recommendations to plan your budgets and bids and forecast upcoming changes.

D. Audience signals

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.

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.