The holidays are right around the corner! Are your eCommerce campaigns ready?

There’s still time to get everything buttoned up for a successful holiday season. Below is our summary for holiday planning on Google to help you stay on track.

  • Check Feed Health – Confirm that there are no disapprovals, and add any additional products that may be missing.
  • Test Automated Bid Strategy – Are your campaigns utilizing Smart Bidding technology? If not, it’s time to make the switch!
  • Review Q4 Budgets – Confirm that all interested parties are aligned on budgets for the rest of the year. Be sure to factor in seasonality and historical spend as cost goes up with the competitive holiday season.
  • Evaluate Your Sites Customer Experience – Walk yourself through the exact conversion flow your customer would take to assure there are no hiccups in the process.
  • Verify Conversion Tracking – While going through the conversion flow also check that tracking is working properly. Be sure that Google is optimizing towards the correct conversion actions.
  • Prepare Creative – This is the time to finalize all creative concepts. Creative delivery dates need to be early enough to ensure smooth and timely launches.
  • Refine Bids & Budgets – Gradually adjust bid budget and ROAS targets in the time leading up to peak season, making large swings in either could result in poor performance, use the 20% rule. No budget or bid should be changed up or down by more than 20% at a time. Allow the campaigns to adjust to these changes before doing another change.
    • Check Remarketing Tag – Capturing down funnel traffic will be important during the holiday season as shoppers browse and research. Be sure to confirm your remarketing tag is firing correctly. Additionally, have your customer match list refreshed. This can serve as a way to remarket or suppress current users.
      • Last Chance to Launch New Campaigns – Don’t wait until the day before Black Friday to launch a search, YouTube, display, or app campaign. Campaigns need time to adjust and learn. To have the best performance possible launch at least 2-3 weeks before peak season.
      • Don’t make any big changes in November/December! – If you did your job right you have been ramping your campaigns up slowly. Now is not the time to overreact to performance. Keep an eye on your campaigns and only make minor adjustments to bids and budgets as needed.
      • Swap in Creative – Holiday-themed creative and messaging should be uploaded and ready to go. It can take 1-2 days for new ads to be approved. It is recommended to upload and pause ads in advance to assure ads go live on time. The same goes for your sales and promotions message changes.
      • Keep an Eye on Budget Allocations – Perhaps the majority of your budget will go to cyber week, but is your brand having an after-Christmas sale? Be sure to have enough budget left to ramp back up when needed.

Follow this checklist and your search and shopping campaigns will flourish over the holiday season! For more information on how to optimize your Google campaigns reach out to our team of experts at [email protected]

– Andrea Duffy-Cabana, Search Strategist