Your guide to peak success

Just as it’s important to prepare early on and inspect your equipment for a climb, it helps to run checks on your Shopping campaigns to ensure they’re in proper working order. Here’s how:

1. Keep customers informed about price drops using sale price attribute, promotion ID, and merchant promotions, as well as shipping settings to communicate shipping details.

2. Leverage product details, highlights, energy class, condition, or “ships from [country]” to communicate important information to sustainability-driven users.

3. Use values such as pre-order and backorder for users that are willing to wait for ideal pricing and conditions.

4. Provide relevant content via titles, descriptions, and high-quality images to consumers who research extensively before purchasing.

5. Ensure that your feeds are up to date and ready to serve your customers.

The time of year determines how you approach any climb – always consider how seasonality might affect the road ahead. This is crucial during the busy peak season. With Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year all in quick succession, it’s important to keep your ads organised as you move from one key event to the next.

Key tips to structure your campaigns:

1. Align Shopping campaign structure with metrics your business is pursuing, like margin, profit, sale of seasonal items. Promote categories with highest likelihood to perform well and/or categories with overstock for business objectives.

2. Implement low volume SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) strategy for better inventory utilisation and visibility of items that might be cheaper or sustainable alternatives.

3. Use Local Inventory Ads (LIA) via local only, hybrid campaigns to connect physical and digital points of sale.

4. Leverage audience lists such as Remarketing and Customer Match Lists to re-engage with users that are exposed to your business after peak.

In the same way a cable car can make an uphill journey a lot more straightforward, Performance Max can help you to reach new customers at scale, elevating your campaigns to new heights. It uses the best automation capabilities, allowing you to access your entire Google Ads inventory from a single campaign. Performance Max insights can also help you identify trends in your market and highlight current and upcoming interest in your products or services.

We created a helpful checklist to help you structure your Performance Max campaigns:

• Structure: build a new sales campaign for the Performance Max campaigns (VS keeping the original structure)

• Asset Groups: create asset groups with relevant seasonal creatives

• Audience Signals: add relevant audience signals like first-party data, sales converters, and last year’s Black Friday list

• Budget: ensure this is unconstrained

• Bids: use lower ROAS to capture more demand

• Enable final URL optimisation on campaign settings to allow machine learning to select the right landing page to drive performance based on customer intent.

• Create a separate Performance Max campaign for specific products that you would like to feature during peak holiday season.

Note: Start the Performance Max campaign at least 2 weeks before the key event/date for your company. This allows time to collect data and adjust your targets according to your business objectives, i.e. for visibility, setting a low target ROAS could help.