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As the big sale season approaches, it’s crucial to ensure your Shopping and Performance Max (PMax) campaigns are set up for success. This guide offers actionable tips to help you optimize your campaigns, from auditing your product feed to refreshing your data and analyzing performance. Let’s dive in!
Tip 1: Auditing – Ensure Your Product Feed Follows Best Practices
Start by auditing your linked merchant feed using the Shopping Feed Audit. This report helps identify areas for improvement, such as disapproved products, items advertised in multiple campaigns, missing brand information in product titles or descriptions, and empty attributes.
Addressing these issues ensures that your feed is primed for optimal performance (and you can schedule it to stay up to date).
Tip 2: Creating – Set Up Campaigns for Sale Products with Ease
Case A: Products Labeled with “Black Friday” or “Sale”
If you label sale products using a custom attribute, leverage the Product Selection feature during campaign creation in Shopping Campaign Management. This advanced option allows you to instruct the campaign to include only products that meet specific criteria, such as CustomAttribute0 = “sale”.
Please consider that this setting cannot be edited after the campaign is launched.
Note that the attribute will be required at the ad group/asset group or campaign level hierarchy, you’ll see the disclaimer when building the structure.
Case B: Grouping Products Based on Performance
Our advanced option for creating multiple campaigns based on performance or custom rules is ideal for segmenting products. If you’re familiar with creating campaigns like heroes/sidekicks/villains/zombies, this feature is perfect.
Define rules to bucket your best-performing, mid-performing, and low-performing products into separate campaigns. You can select the lookback window on how campaigns should consider performance and other basic settings, like initial daily budget and new ad group bid/target ROAS:
With the funnel approach, the tool begins with All Products and saves those that meet the criteria for the first campaign. Products that don’t match are passed to the next campaign, where they’re evaluated against a new set of criteria.
This process continues through subsequent campaigns until it reaches the final, optional Catch-All/Learning bucket campaign.
These campaigns will have item ID at the last level in the product group/listing group, which can help our system move products from one campaign to another depending on their performance when refreshing them (check Tip #3 in this guide).
Case C: Using Your Assets for PMax Campaign Creation
When setting up a Performance Max Retail campaign, take advantage of the option to configure your assets, including headlines, descriptions, images, and YouTube videos. This flexibility enables you to create more personalized and effective ads.
If your asset group hierarchy includes feed attributes, you will be able to dynamically insert them to create unique assets for each asset group:
Case D: Previewing Product Placement & Creating Paused Campaigns
In the Bids and Budgets section, you will find the first preview of the campaigns to be created and the breakdown of how many elements and products will be saved, plus the option to change the initial campaign status*:
This is particularly useful if you’re preparing campaigns in advance of a sale, like Black Friday, and want to activate them at the right moment.
Campaign Status is not available for performance-based campaigns, as they start with an enabled status.
Tip 3: Refreshing – Keep Your Campaigns Aligned with the Latest Data
Use the refresher automation in Shopping Campaign Management to ensure your campaigns are aligned with the most current data from your feed. This is especially valuable for performance-based campaigns, where products can be moved between campaigns based on their performance.
Tip 4: Analyzing – Leverage Insights for Advanced Analysis
Once your campaigns are live, utilize Shopping Analysis to aggregate performance data. This tool allows you to pinpoint which products are driving the most conversions within a selected date range and across specific campaigns, for example.
Tip 5: Reporting and Alerting – Stay on Top of Performance
Keep track of your campaigns’ performance by designing and scheduling custom Reports. Use widgets like Top Performers to highlight the best-performing product groups and Feed Analysis for a detailed look at attribute-based data.
Additionally, set up Alerts to monitor products that either excel or underperform, and receive automatic notifications for any disapproval.
You can also create an alert to be notified if a certain number of your products get disapproved.
Tip 6: Wrapping Up – Easily Pause Campaigns Post-Season
Once the sale season ends, quickly pause your campaigns using Rule Engine. If you’ve used a naming convention like “Black Friday 2024”, you can create a rule to find and pause all matching campaigns in one go. This ensures a smooth transition out of the sale period.
By the end of this period, you can create a simple strategy at the campaign level, to find all enabled campaigns with “Black Friday 2024” in the name:
In the action, you can just pick to modify status: Pause, so this will be applied to all the matching campaigns:
Finally, on the Suggestions page, you’ll be able to bulk pause the matching campaigns:
We hope this guide provides you with the tools and insights needed to maximize your sales campaigns. If you need further assistance or training, please reach out to our support team at support@optmyzr.com.