Happy New Year! Oops! Wait. We haven’t quite made it through the holiday shopping season yet. Many retailers already have their marketing plans in full swing. ‘Tis the time for increased bidding, cost, and ultimately more revenue. However, in order to make the season profitable, you’ll need to make sure you have a solid plan in place for marketing your products effectively in shopping channels.
Here are just a handful of places to start:
Top Products
Take a look at your current top performing products. Some may be similar in nature so a separate campaign may be beneficial to set a particular budget for them. Also, look at your historical product data to know what drives the most revenue, along with what would make the most sense to bid up on to get more impression share during particular days and/or times.
Cost vs ROI
Some product prices are very low but drive high conversion or may be high but have low conversion. Drill into your product mix to find the product pricing range that drive the move conversions compared to their return. These products should be bid up to drive more revenue.
If working with a limited budget, you may want to decrease or even pause your low margin products during the holidays to push your ROI up.
Promotions / Sales
With the holidays, there are always a sale or promotion to be had. Don’t miss out on using Google’s Merchant Promotion feature if your promotion qualifies.
Also, when you have a set budget for promotions or sales, break your products out into separate campaigns so that you can monitor spend as well as have customized ad text for them.
Seasonal Items
This sometimes can be overlooked because the data attributes associated with the products don’t call out their seasonality. Make sure to include seasonality of you products whether it be that the product is associated with a particular holiday or season. With it called out in your feed, it makes adding them as a Custom Label quick and setting up a seasonal campaign a breeze.
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
