Top tips to optimize for the holiday season and beyond with Google AI

The holiday season has evolved. It's no longer just about Black Friday or Cyber Monday. For example, did you know that in 2023 there were 8 days in December that had higher spend than Cyber Monday?¹ 

From the excitement of double-digit sale days, to the post-holiday "new year, new me" resolutions, we’re here to help you anticipate the unexpected and drive profitable growth year-round. Discover the latest products and features designed to help you win the peak days you know and the new ones you don’t with Google AI.

Set yourself up for success with insights and optimizations powered by Google

With 72% of retail marketers saying consumer insights are helpful in planning their holiday marketing strategies², Google offers tools and insights to understand customers, track performance, and refine your approach in real-time.

• [NEW] In Google Ads, visit the product page to discover category-level insights on performance, demand trends, and actionable recommendations to help drive additional clicks and sales.
• [NEW] Attract new customers during peak periods with the new customer acquisition goal in Performance Max and Search campaigns. To prioritize ad placements that have higher profitability, optimize to profit goals (currently in beta testing) in Performance Max and Standard Shopping campaigns. Customers who use gross profit optimization in smart bidding see, on average, a 15% uplift in campaign profit, compared to revenue-only bidding optimizations.³
• [NEW] Get clear summaries and tailored recommendations on your product assortment and performance in Google Merchant Center with generated insights and generated reports. You’ll see a summary of your product inventory performance on the top of your Analytics tab. If you want something more tailored, use natural language prompts to create a customized report. Also explore the popular search terms and topics relevant to your product inventory to find what's trending in order to make more informed inventory decisions and product descriptions.
• [NEW] Measure and optimize the impact of your App campaigns with privacy-centric incrementality tests. Use geo-based conversion lift studies to assess iOS and Android performance. Set up experiments in Google Ads and integrate with Google Analytics 4 or your own first-party data for comprehensive results.
• Use Performance Planner and check demand forecasts to predict and prepare for the holiday shopping surge. Adjust your campaign budgets and ROAS targets 4-6 weeks before the peak season.

Generate custom business reports from a unique prompt specific to your business

Ignite product discovery with captivating creative

34% of shoppers have already started their holiday shopping in July, which is higher than 27% last year.⁴ Capture these consumers early in the holiday season with holiday creative that resonates.

Wuitusu increased their click-through-rates by 95% YoY and had a 75% decrease in cost per click YoY using Product Studio scene-generated images to spotlight listings and increase sales.

• Create stunning visuals to match the seasonal moments, sale events or any other unexpected shopper mood with Product Studio. Starting in September, within your Merchant Center account or the Google & YouTube app on Shopify, navigate to Product Studio to generate videos based on your product images. Our AI-powered tool will customize the video to match your brand, adjust your images, and even write a script that highlights your product's best qualities. As with all Product Studio assets, you can apply these to your Ads campaigns or scale them to your other marketing channels.
• Create more eye-catching visuals and compelling ad copy with generative AI creative tools in Performance Max. Use asset generation to build new holiday lifestyle imagery or create new image variations with our AI-powered image editor, which is now integrated with your Google Merchant Center feed so you can showcase your products in holiday settings and backdrops. Use automatically created assets in Search and Performance Max campaigns to dynamically optimize headlines and descriptions so they’re more relevant to rapidly-changing user searches during the holidays.

Instantly generate brand-aligned product images and captivating videos that reflect your brand's unique aesthetic, all with just one reference image

Empower your brand with full-funnel marketing solutions

By leveraging actionable insights and understanding customer intent, you can effectively engage, convert, and retain customers at every touchpoint. 

Domma boosted site traffic 79% and conversion value 135% with budget optimization in Performance Max. Domma attributes much of its online success to Performance Max for helping increase the volume and quality of traffic to its site.

• [NEW] Refine your Performance Max campaigns with new features and controls. Use URL contains rules to expand your reach by targeting additional category or multi-product pages on your website while maintaining precision. And apply improved brand exclusions, which you can now customize at the format-level to exclude branded queries specifically for Search ads only, while continuing to match to branded queries for your Shopping ads. Reach out to your Google team to join the beta.
• [NEW] Let shoppers know what you have available in store and convert local shopping intent into store sales and foot traffic with the new automated onboarding process and pickup later with product data for your local inventory ads. The automated onboarding process syncs your in-store availability from your website with your Merchant Center account.
• [NEW] Leverage loyalty promotions to attract and retain your most valuable customers. Implement member pricing annotations and tailored bidding strategies to showcase exclusive discounts and incentivize loyalty.
• Offsite Retail Media in Search Ads 360 empowers your brand suppliers to leverage your first-party data to reach more shoppers and drive them back to your site to purchase. It also provides valuable insights with closed-loop reporting that ties ad spend to sales. Retailers such as Albertsons and Best Buy have joined Lowe’s and other retailers in the beta program and recognized its benefits:
  • "SA360's retail media capabilities enable us to share our first-party data and product feed with brand suppliers in a privacy-safe way to fuel more effective campaigns, and ultimately empower us to improve relationships with brands and sell more products together."
    — Seth Hagerty, Senior Director of Performance Marketing at Best Buy Ads
• Activate the Ads Power Pair. Combine AI-powered Search campaigns (with broad match) and Performance Max campaigns to drive more sales across all Google channels at the strongest ROI. 
• Engage with your most loyal and deal seeking shoppers by leveraging your app using Web to App Connect and promotion assets for App campaigns. Web to App Connect drives incremental conversions for your web campaigns, with advertisers achieving an average increase of 21% web ROI after increasing their App campaign for install spend⁵. Meanwhile, promotion assets effectively attract shoppers by highlighting special offers, sales, or app installations, further boosting your sales potential.
• Demand Gen campaigns help you find and convert consumers with immersive, relevant, and visual creatives—across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. Pair your tailored creative with specific audience segments to deliver the most relevant message at the right moment. 
• Take an omnichannel approach to Smart Bidding and include store sales or store visit conversions in campaign goals. Test the impact of various omnichannel bidding scenarios in Search and Standard Shopping campaigns with Omnichannel Experiments, for example adding store sales to online-only campaigns or increasing store visit values.

Get ahead of the curve with real-time, AI-powered recommendations

Adapting to consumer behavior mid-season is easier with Google AI. Stay ahead of the curve with real-time insights and recommendations, allowing you to proactively adapt to the evolving holiday shopping landscape.

• To avoid missing out on unexpected spikes in demand consider removing budget caps, and stay flexible using recommendations to optimize your budget. For short-term sales events, apply seasonality adjustments if you expect to see dramatic shifts in conversion rates.
• Elevate your shopping experience with the Store Quality scorecard from the analytics section in Merchant Center. See how you compare to others in your category on delivery, shipping costs, returns, and seller rating. Review this regularly to identify areas for improvement and evolve your shopping experience.
• Get suggested pricing for your offers and see the estimated impressions, clicks, conversions, and gross profit uplift for each, with our Price Insights report. 

 

Don't just survive the holidays—thrive year-round. Uncover those hidden opportunities, anticipate the unexpected, and create marketing magic that resonates with every customer, every day.

The time to rewrite your playbook is now. With Google AI as your guide, you can navigate this new landscape with confidence. 

Posted by Jyotika Prasad, Senior Director, Retail Ads

 

 

1. Source: Mastercard U.S. Spending Pulse for in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment. 2023.
2. Source: Google/Ipsos Post-Holiday Marketer Survey, US, n=400 marketers and advertisers, Feb 20 - March 10, 2024.
3. Source: Google Internal Data, Global, Shopping campaigns, 2023, Profit defined as: Revenue minus COGs.
4. Source: Google commissioned Ipsos Consumer Continuous, US, CA, UK, FR, DE, IT, AU, JP, IN, CN, BR, MX, ES, ZA, KR  ~n=500-1000 online consumers 18+ per market. July 2-5, 2024.
5. Source: Google Internal Data, Nov 2023.