Strategies and Best Practices for Achieving an Increased Year-Over-Year Return from Google Shopping for Q4!

The start of October marks the beginning of the fourth quarter, and if you are looking to generate sales, there is no better time than this period. Online marketing helps sellers increase their numbers during this most important time of year for sales-oriented businesses. So, if you have not already used Google Shopping’s ad strategy to make the most of the end of the year sales, you have missed out on a lot. And by a lot, I mean some serious numbers in terms of customers and sales revenue.

This festive season sees shoppers crowd online stores by the thousands for the purpose of holiday shopping. With so many things happening in the final quarter it is not just Christmas that is attracting people towards online shopping. Just to name a few of the holiday attractions in the final quarter, here are the names of the most important holiday events in chronological order that attract millions of shoppers towards online stores during this time of the year.

• Halloween
• Thanksgiving
• Black Friday
• Small Business Saturday
• Cyber Monday
• Green Monday
• Super Saturday
• And to top it all…Christmas (which is mostly associated with the majority of the aforementioned)

Google Shopping has been the leading source of marketing especially of e-retail businesses in 2018. As of 2018, Google Shopping ads now drive 76.4% of all retail search ad spend, and this search spend generates 85.3% of all clicks. It has made retailers much more relevant in terms of competing with Amazon. The retail market has been dominated by Amazon, and almost a blasphemous 50% of all the money spent on online shopping was captured by Amazon last year. Other retailers have to up their ante to compete with the e-commerce giant. Google Shopping provides these retailers with the opportunity they need.

With the fourth quarter already upon them, retailers will have to buckle up and tighten their seat belts if they want to lock horns with competitors and maximize their earnings during the festive season. If you are unsure what you NEED to do to make the best of this opportunity, we are here to provide you with Google Shopping ad strategies and practices that will help you capitalize on the opportunity at hand.

1. Before Planning for the Future, Take a Deep Look at the Past

Before you start planning for the fourth quarter, hold your horses. Take a deep breath and gain a deep insight into your past quarters’ performance. It will give you an idea about your products that have generated the best numbers. Highlight your stars and cash cows, and then start developing a strategy that has attainable goals and objectives.

Remember that 40% of the buyers do their gift shopping before Thanksgiving. That means your campaigns with your best performing SKUs and categories need to go live a few days before that. You can only figure your best performers out if you have done a deep analysis of the previous quarters’ performance.

Extra Tip: You might need to go back to previous year’s Q4 too. It can help you in determining any other SKUs that performed better in Q4 last time out, so you can design your Google Shopping ad campaign around it.

2. Optimize Poor Performers to Get the Most Out of Them

There are no bad products. It’s mostly about an ineffective marketing strategy. With the holiday season looming just over your heads it might just be time to boost the performance of some of your products that have not been able to perform despite their potential.

If you know that some of your products have not performed as you expected them to perform, it is very likely you have not marketed them effectively. Getting these products optimized should be your next course of action.

Having an optimized product feed is the most important requirement of any successful Google Shopping ad campaign, and there is no better time than the festive season to shift inventory and get value for your underperformers. Having the title of your products well-defined within Google’s 150-character limit is the first and foremost step in optimization. Be sure to include as much as you can in these characters. Similarly, the description needs to be complete and concise. With an added touch of keyword enrichment, your chances of beating competition rise significantly.

Keyword search is important. You should use other tools such as SEMrush alongside AdWords Keyword Planner to generate the best keywords that make your products sell better.

3. Get Your Ads Preapproved

As already discussed,  many  buyers are done with their gift shopping before Thanksgiving. It is not only smart, but also a pre-requisite for a successful fourth quarter that you are proactive. Having your campaign optimized takes effort and time, and you certainly do not want that to go in vain, especially in a peak period.

Take this for example, in 2018 the highest number of clicks in the fourth quarter for apparel retailers are expected around the 46^th week. That is between 17^th December and 23^rd December. You better have  your ads loaded up before r this period. W If you wait to post your ads until this period arrives, Google may disapprove of them. Google takes at least one business day to review your ads, so it is better to have them approved beforehand, rather than wasting important days during this oh-so-crucial period for sales.

4. Product Ratings

Anything that can make your ad stand out in a positive way is good for your campaign, and helps you shove off competition during this rush hour period. Enabling product ratings is a very effective way of making your products stand out in a crowd. Coupled with the most striking product images, product ratings can be the point of differentiation your product needed.

Product ratings reinforce the buyer’s buying decision and helps in driving your Quality Score. This  leads to greater reach and a lower cost-per-click (CPC). Product ratings are different than seller ratings that you can see with text ads. They only become visible after you have at least 3 reviews for your product and 50 reviews in total for all your product offerings.

You can have product ratings enabled with Google’s Product Rating Interest Form. Once you have submitted this form, Google takes around 24 hours to review it and then gets back to you with an answer.

5. Win Familiar Visitors with RLSAs

Remarketing Lists can prove to be very helpful in making the most of the festive period sales. People who have visited your website previously like those who have not checked out their shopping carts or are regular visitors who do not make any purchases are all targeted through RLSAs. You can easily target these visitors who have a higher chance of buying your products.

Targeting these people aggressively is a very effective measure and can work wonders for your Google Shopping ad campaign during the 4^th quarter of the year. It can lead to higher click-throughs and conversion rates as well as bringing down your CPA (cost per acquisition) and CPC (cost per click).

Using all these strategies and tips can help you make the most of your holiday season. Good luck maximizing your profits and beating out your competition.