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With this article, we would like to help you prepare for your product launches during these essential shopping dates. Follow the guidelines in this article to prepare for any sales event or product launch.
Product data
First, check if your product data is up-to-date, accurate, and high quality. To ensure data quality, you can read our article about product data optimization for free listings.
Automatic improvement
After providing all necessary product data, make sure automatic item updates are enabled to decrease mismatches in availability and product price between your data feed and landing page. Don’t worry, automatic item updates are enabled by default. You can manage this setting by selecting Automatic improvements under Settings in the Merchant Center.
Promotional text
It is best to avoid using promotional terms like “only today” or “buy two get one free” in your title or image. You want your title to have a clear description and your image to clearly show the product you are selling. You can communicate discount promotions in your Shopping ads by setting the discount and original prices in your feed.
Processing time
Data that is newly added needs processing time. If you need to add additional product data before an event or product launch, make sure you do this 3-5 business days before the essential shopping date.
Preorders
If you take preorders, you need to set the availability attribute to preorder and the availability date attribute to the product’s official release date. Shoppers are now able to buy your product before the release date. You can set the availability attribute to in_stock on or after the release date.
If you do not want to take preorders, you need to set the availability attribute to out_of_stock before release. Once you are launching the product, you can change the availability attribute to in_stock.
Product capacities
Make sure that you have enough product capacities in your account. If the number of products you would like to show exceeds your capacity in the Merchant Center, you will receive a warning. Once you have reached your product capacity, you will not be able to submit any additional products. Please make sure to check your product capacity before adding new products for special events or product launches since it can take up to 7 business days before an additional quota request for your product capacity can be approved.
Event logo
If you have prepared a special logo for an essential shopping date, make sure that you update the logo 2-3 days in advance. You can change your logo to a special events logo by navigating to Business information under Tools and settings in the Merchant Center.
From here, you can either drag and drop your image file or hover your mouse over the box and click Upload.
Promotions
You can use promotions to distribute online offers with your Shopping ads on Google.com and Google’s Shopping tab. Reviews for promotions are usually done within 12 hours after submission. However, it may take longer during peak times. Take this into account by submitting your promotions at least 24 hours before your launch or the essential shopping date. Based on Google Shopping insights, roughly half of the EMEA holiday shoppers will refrain from buying gifts until they are on sale. Keep this in mind when planning your promotions.
Website and landing page
It is key to make sure your website and landing page are stable and working prior to and during big events and product launches.
- Ensure you meet all of the landing page requirements and check if the content on your landing page is consistent. You do not want to change the content on your landing page based on user variables, like location, IP address, device type, browser, or cookies. That being said, make sure that your landing page is mobile-friendly.
- Test your website page with Googlebot crawling capabilities. Your items will not be eligible to show if your website can not be crawled.
Campaigns
To ensure your Shopping campaigns are set up correctly to show ads during a special event or product launch, follow these best practices:
- Set the correct campaign priority if you advertise the same product for the same country in multiple Shopping campaigns. Also, make sure to set the correct campaign launch date. You can set the correct campaign priority by navigating to Settings in the page menu of the Campaigns menu in your Google Ads account. From there, you can select a priority level in the Campaign priority section.
- Avoid targeting the same products in various campaigns with an identical target audience or leaving products untargeted. Do this by double-checking your inventory filter and product group status.
- If you are using Smart Shopping campaigns, make sure to give a new campaign 2-3 weeks to adapt before making any changes. The machine learning that Smart Shopping campaigns use takes time to optimize. Also, it is beneficial to pause other campaigns for the same products or groups of products, as that will minimize the interference on the machine learning of Smart Shopping campaigns.
We hope this guide helped you to get ready for essential shopping dates and product launches! If you have any questions or need help with this process, please don’t hesitate to contact us at css@shoparize.com.
