About business events

Sales, promotions, and other key business events offer opportunities to attract new customers, but it’s difficult to schedule all the automation necessary to prepare for upcoming events. To make sure you're ready for frequent, recurring events, use business data to describe the events. Then create automated rules that change bids, pause or unpause ads and campaigns, and make other changes before and after each instance of the event. You can also set up bid strategies that automatically adjust bids based on the event. Finally, you can create reports that show the effect the event had on your campaign performance.

For example:

• A sports merchandise marketer uploads game schedules as business events. Then the marketer creates automated rules to pause and unpause campaigns for each team depending on the team's schedule of games.
• A financial services advertiser uploads the schedule for announcements from central banks and finance ministries. Then the marketer creates automated rules to raise and lower bids in anticipation of the announcements.
• A travel advertiser uses automated rules to update ad copy in time for scheduled fare sales.

Start with existing business data

Before you can use business events, apply business data to the campaigns, ad groups, and other items that can be affected by your events. The business data you apply can be a one-column row, or a more complex row with many columns. 

Here's a example list of campaigns for a retailer. A business data row containing the Brand.ID column has been applied to each campaign to identify the brand of shoe that's being advertised.

Add events to the business data

To describe a business event in Search Ads 360, you add the following information to a business data table:

• A description of what changes during the event. Each description is called an event variable.
  For example, in a "back to school" sale, you may discount some brands of shoes by 20%. So your event will include the Discount % variable set to .20.
• Start and end dates
• Rows within the business data table that are affected by the event.

Here's an example of adding two business events to the "Speedy Shoes" and "Comfy Walkers" rows in the Brand business data table:

Table name: Brand

Report on the event

If you segment a report by an event's variable, during an event you'll see the event's variable amount. For example, if you segment a campaign report by Brand.Discount % while the 20% sale is in effect, you'll see .20 in the Brand.Discount % column.

If you create segmented reports that contain metrics before, during, and after the event, you can see the effect the event had on performance.

Viewing an unsegmented report

Note that if you add the event variable's column to a report but you don't segment the report by time or by the event variable itself, the column always shows the current value of the event variable. For example, if an event ran from August 15 to September 15 and today is September 16, the event variable's column will show "--" even if the report's time range ends on September 15. Learn more about business events.

Bid strategies use the event data

If you've applied a Smart Bidding bid strategy to any of the "Speedy Shoes" or "Comfy Walkers" campaigns, the bid strategy automatically uses performance data during past events to anticipate any changes needed before, during, and after the next event.

For example, during the previous 20% discount event, the bid strategy observed that specific Comfy Walkers keywords performed better with higher bids. So, the bid strategy automatically raises bids right at the start of the event, and returns to the lower bids a day after the event ends.

Note that bid strategies may not always raise bids during events. The bid strategy's behavior depends on past performance during an event. In some cases, the optimal behavior may be to lower bids for some keywords and raise bids for others.