As 2023 comes to a close, advertisers and retailers are gearing up for the highly anticipated end-of-year sales. In this article, we will explore the important dates to look out for. You'll gain tips and strategies to effectively prepare your eCommerce campaigns for these sales events.
Whether it's creating a discount strategy, understanding your customer base, or optimizing your product feeds, this article will guide you through the necessary steps to ensure a successful and profitable holiday season. So, get ready to make the most out of Black Friday and the holiday sales by implementing these valuable tips and strategies!
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First things first. What are the dates we need to look out for?
Just the day after Thanksgiving, the most important event on the calendar is Black Friday. Like every year, shoppers expect great deals and discounts. But simply decreasing prices is not always the right thing to do. First, ask yourself the following questions to identify the right sale strategy.
To know more about discount strategies, read our blog post 6 Things to Consider For Your Next Discount Strategy.
If you're reading this post you know already the importance of product feeds for eCommerce businesses. Making sure your feeds and campaigns are in order is always important, but it is even more around this time of the year.
October and November is the time where you really need to focus your efforts on making your feed strategy bulletproof. Or, even better, Black-Friday proof. In fact, Black Friday and the holiday season, in general, is short and nothing should go wrong!
Make sure your product data is correct and reflects exactly what you're showing on the website. Make sure there aren't any missing images and every product has all relevant information.
Original Price, Sale Price, GTIN, Additional Images, are just a few of the product information you might be overlooking but are super essential for Black Friday. Remember the power of supplemental feeds when it comes to adding extra information to your product feeds.
Troubleshooting issues in your feed becomes a whole lot easier if you know where to look. There are a couple of tools that can help.
DataFeedWatch Feed Review
One way is using DataFeedWatch to perform a full feed check. This allows you to avoid errors completely before sending your feed off to the channel you're selling on. It will check your feed for the following:
You'll then get a feed score out of 10, along with steps to fixing each error or warning.
Diagnostics via Google Merchant Center
There's a separate section in Google Merchant Center called Diagnostics that will give you a detailed report about any issues found across your feeds or account. You'll then need to take care of any errors, warnings, or notifications to improve the quality of your feed.
You May Also Find Interesting: 35 Common Merchant Center Errors + How to Fix Them
During the holiday season, your inventory is going to be selling out fast. Because of that, it's important for you to get as many updates as possible so that your feed is always fresh.
For example, if an item goes out of stock then you want to make sure that information is passed to Google as soon as possible. You can do this by setting up multiple feed updates per day if you are using data feed management software, like DataFeedWatch, for example.
This will give you peace of mind during the busiest eCommerce season of the year knowing that your inventory is good and you're not advertising out-of-stock products. It also helps if you make any changes in your feed, because they will be automatically reflected in your ads once the update takes place.
To test DataFeedWatch for FREE - select your feed management plan here.
We'll never stop reminding our readers of the importance of product titles in data feeds. The product title is the most prominent piece of information your prospective customers will see in your ads. Make sure they're optimized for success following our infographic:
Although product descriptions are not usually visible in shopping ads, it is still worth optimizing them as Google uses them for ranking and sorting purposes.
However, if you're also running Search ads or listings on channels where the description is visible, then it's even more important. There are a few things you can keep in mind to ensure your descriptions satisfy a shopper's search. They are:
Custom Labels are custom fields that you can add to your feed. They can contain any piece of product information you want and are used to segment your feed in Google Shopping Campaigns. For example, you might want to enter the product margin in a custom label. Or maybe, the supplier name or the remaining stock.
There are many ways to use Custom Labels, so we summarized how to get the most out of them in our article 15 Examples of Profit-Making Custom Labels for Google Shopping. But for now, take note of the following examples that are very relevant for Black Friday and the holiday season:
Images are also essential for any shopping campaign. In fact, this is also a prominent part of a product ad. Therefore, make sure your images are strong and match the product they're advertising. Also, make sure each product variant has its own image.
Plus, add more than one image per product if you can. Google Shopping allows for additional images and we can't stress enough how important this feature is.
To know more, we had summarized the 7 Rules To Abide By with your Google Shopping Images.
It's easy to add additional images through the optional attribute 'additional_image_link' in your feed. You can add up to 10 extra images.
Now comes the fun part: How to best optimize your campaigns
You can use custom labels and the DataFeedWatch “is in list” function to accomplish this. With that, you'll be able to assign a label of your choice to a list of handpicked products from your store.
Here are 4 examples:
When it comes to Black Friday, it's all about pricing. You have to choose the correct discounting and make sure you're competitive. You can check your competitors' pricing with a price comparison tool like Price Watch, for example.
Then you can segment your product feed based on your products' competitiveness. For example, certain products might be very competitive while others might be more expensive than the competition.
Related read: Increasing profitability through segmenting products based on price competitiveness.
This obviously influences your Google Shopping performance as users tend to prefer cheaper deals, of course. So you might want to use custom labels to identify the competitiveness of your products and bid accordingly.
Also, make sure the Price and Sale Price fields are filled and always up-to-date. Start preparing your feed even from now, so you'll be 100% ready when Black Friday comes!
Make sure you use the correct product variants field (item_group_id) in your feed. This way Google knows you have several variants of the same product and won't make them compete against each other.
Including all products, variants will also lead shoppers right to you if they're looking for a specific product that you carry. For example, let's say they're looking for a long, yellow, raincoat. Instead of having to sift through several screens of other colored raincoats, they'll be shown exactly what they want right away.
A great feature Google introduced a few years ago is Promotion Feeds. Instead of updating product by product in your main feed every time you have a promotion, you can instead upload a promotion feed where you highlight which promotion each product should belong to. When you add a product to your promotions feed, it will also appear in your ads and will help you stand out with any offer that you have.
Following the previous point, you could show different promotions to different users. You can do this by having separate campaigns per audience and using promotion feeds. For example, you can:
Let's say you want to target shoppers who have visited a certain website page and left before they added anything to their cart, but found that the conversion rate was lower than targeted. In this case, you could use your discounted items to incentivize shoppers and start boosting sales.
Midsummer Agency did exactly that and created a rule in DataFeedWatch to see the plan through. They created an 'ads_label' and named it 'sales' to segment discounted products.
It's important to note that the 'ads_label' isn't the same as a custom label and can only be used in display campaigns.
Then they created a test remarketing campaign which was an exact copy of the original one. It only showed the products that were on sale and only showed them to shoppers who had had an interest in them in the last 30 days.
The results of this tactic were an 18% increase in conversion rate, a 20% improvement in bounce rate, and a 20% increase in the click-through rate.
If you also sell offline you definitely want to look at Local Inventory Ads. We talked about the Local Inventory Ads Feed in our article 6 Google Shopping Feed Types and How to Use Them. Check it out! Local Inventory Ads bridge the gap between the online and offline experience. Users can search for your products and see in which location you sell them.
They can then see the pricing and availability and eventually visit your store and complete the purchase. This will be invaluable this coming holiday season. In fact, we still don't know whether consumers will keep favoring online shopping vs in-store, or even if stores will be at full capacity. Therefore, we need to be ready for any possible scenario.
Local Inventory Ads make sure we are. Also, thanks to this ad format you can highlight potential click-and-collect programs, which we believe will be very popular this year. Users might still prefer to buy online, but also have the certainty of collecting their purchases in person, hence avoiding potential shipping delays and disruptions.
This is one of our favorite tips. Although Google Shopping is the go-to destination for retailers and feed-based campaigns, it is definitely not the only solution you can avail of. Actually, it shouldn't! The Google search result page is busy and you want to be as visible as possible.
For this reason, you should use feeds to also advertise regular search ads. This will double your visibility and chances to get clicked. It's very time-consuming to create a text ad for each product you sell, so our Feed-Driven Text Ads solution will help you do just that - automatically!
Now it's time to act and plan your strategy.
But this is still not enough:
Based on all the previous information, strategize on when to start, possibly pause and end your campaigns. This year you might want to start as soon as possible. In fact, shipping disruptions and delays are bringing consumers to plan their holiday shopping earlier than ever before. You definitely want to be there right in time for when they'll be looking for you!
Following on what just mentioned, this year there's a new important topic: shipping. Consumers are now aware of the issues retailers are facing with their supply chains. Therefore, they are more sensitive than ever to shipping times, policies, and stock levels. Make sure you do the following to prevent losing customers:
Google Shopping and Ads products in general keep updating all the time. Every year there are new tools marketers can use to advertise their business and defeat competition. Staying up to date with the latest news is not easy and time-consuming.
But it's even harder to eventually implement the new features as you might find resistance from your boss, other stakeholders or even clients if you are an agency.
We at DataFeedWatch are advocates of always following the best practices and upgrading your setup whenever possible. This is year is going to be more relevant than ever. We want to flag a couple of features in Google Shopping that we think you should look at:
To recap, these are our main suggestions for the upcoming holiday season: