Image Credit: Unsplash @beccatapert

Seasonal events like Valentine’s Day are a good time to maximise sales opportunities and gain profitable engagement to paid ads. No brand should let this great opportunity pass by without a Product Feed Management Checklist.

The expected retail spending on Valentine’s Day 2020 was 855 Million GBP, 2 million more than 2019, meaning it is a good time to work on shopping ads that will increase your return on investment (ROI). It’s also a great chance to start the new year right in February, setting the tone for success for the remaining 10 months of the year.

Here is our google shopping ads checklist to ensure that you are making the most of your sales this Valentine’s Day.

Gather data with Google Trends and Keyword Planner

Google trends and keyword planner are your best friends during seasonal events like Valentine’s Day. Google Trends as part of your product feed management enables you to review search queries and understand what shoppers want to buy as well as studying trend popularity. Are people searching for flowers, chocolate, or cards? Or are users doing their pre-purchase research for clothing and accessories?

Why is it so important to get your keywords right? Well, the right keywords will get you in front of your potential customers. Use Keyword Planner to do your keywords research, it will help you select the right search terms.

Target, target, target

According to Statista, UK men spend more than women on Valentine’s Day sales, so don’t forget to target those men. As a business, you should make sure you know your target audience. Once you’ve identified your target, segment them by demographic, gender, age, marital status and income.

Target users with high purchase intent and target them by hobbies and interests. Also, keep marriages and engagements in mind when targeting your audience for your shopping campaigns.

During seasonal sales like Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, Christmas sales, competition is sky-high. This is why targeting well will give you an advantage. Becoming visible in an overcrowded marketplace, with lots of businesses pushing similar products to a similar target audience can be difficult. It’s easier to hand the job over to a Google CSS partner. A Google CSS partner collects different prices from online retailers and connects these effectively with shoppers through Shopping ads.

Be budget flexible

As mentioned before, the competition will increase during Valentine’s Day sales. So, for key campaigns, set a flexible budget that you can easily increase if you end up needing it. Should you need some last-minute Valentine’s Day ads, consider higher bidding.

As a Google CSS partner, we can create a new CSS approved Merchant Center and connect to your Google Ads account. Once the product in your new Merchant Centre has been approved by Google, you can then build new shopping campaigns that link to the new CSS approved Merchant Center ID.

Timing and structure

Gathering the necessary data and establishing your target audience and budget will help get your timings right. Use the information you gathered to understand when is best to catch your customers online and push your ads specifically around those times, be it at lunch time or during peak commute hours. Your product feed management strategy is extremely important when it comes to structuring. The best structured your ads are, the more time-efficient you can be in case of a last-minute change.

Optimise Ad copy and keywords

Use Valentine’s Day-related keywords and phrases to enhance your opportunities of appearing on user searches. Develop the keywords from your keyword research and make a list of top searches. Some good examples could be:

– Valentine’s Gifts

– Valentine’s Present for Men

– Valentine’s for Girlfriend

Also, get creative when optimising your Product Feed. Pay special attention to product titles and product descriptions which will boost your Impressions and Clicks. If you sell products that you feel make great gifts and presents for Valentine’s day, optimise your products to push that message. Also include Custom Labels such as Valentines or be more specific such as Womens Valentines or Valentines Over £50 etc.

Product Feed Management: Example

Current Product Title: Lancôme La Vie est Belle Eau de Parfum – 100ml

Optimised Product Title: Lancôme La Vie est Belle Eau de Parfum – 100ml | Valentine Present/Gift for Her

The optimised Product Title is still well under the maximum character of 150. If you prefer not to optimise your existing Product Titles, you can use our unique Clone feature to create new instances of your products that you can then optimise for specific retail events such as Valentine’s Day.

This Product Feed Management checklist will help your business during one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year.

Contact us today for more information about our product feed management tool or arrange a Demo. As a Goggle CSS partner, we can help you get the best-performing google shopping campaigns.