Is a peak sales season approaching soon? Are you running flash sales and worrying that you might forget something?
This article helps you prepare for any peak season and get the best results. We guide you through the most critical items to check and update.
7-14 days before: Validate catalogs and Pixel setup
First and foremost, you need to make sure your basic setup is done correctly, and that your critical assets are in place. Take the actions in this section 1-2 weeks before the actual campaign dates. Doing last minute fixes to these critical things can be very hard or even impossible.
Create image templates
Prepare to finalize your image templates several days before your holiday season campaign goes live.
All ad platforms see an increased processing load during the holiday season. Creating your image templates ahead of time ensures that all products have the right promotional template available.
You can then switch the creatives to use the right template at the right time later.
We strongly advise against using countdown fields in Image Templates during the holiday season. It can cause significant under-delivery of ads.
Countdowns trigger a reprocessing of the image, and the ad platform needs to re-upload (and re-approve) this new image before the product can deliver again in an ad. Because peak holiday sales periods see significant processing delays, using countdowns can prevent delivery of several catalog products for several hours or even days.
Another good thing to note is that any change (manual or automatic from feed) in fields used within the ad (including the image) will push the product to review. And while it's in review, it's not being shown in the ads!
To keep the item availability at a high level, we recommend keeping the change to image templates minimal. Please see here for best practices.
Prep your catalogs
Ideally, your catalogs should be at least 1 month old so that they have time to collect enough data to inform the display algorithm.
Consider enabling Catalog Alerts so that you receive an email notification if the catalog processing fails.
Update the sales prices, but do it right. We recommend that you don't change the product “Price” field in your catalog to contain your special offer prices. Instead, map the deal price to the Sale Price column in your feed, and set the Sales Effective Date to when this price is available. And voilà! You get pre-programmed price changes without massive last-minute catalog refreshes.
For more information on how to edit the Sales Effective Date, see Optional General Feed Fields -> sale_price_effective_date.
And as for ad copy, you can then use "Current Price" {{product.current_price}} field to show the special offer price.
If you haven't provided "Sales Effective Date", Current Price will always show the value you have mapped to "Sale Price".
If you have defined a "Sales Effective Date", Current Price will show the regular "Price" value before and after the sale is valid. During the valid period, it will show "Sale Price" instead.
An alternative approach is to use Custom Labels. If you are not comfortable with configuring the dates and using Current Price, you can also set this price to one of the Custom Labels in your Product Catalog (note that depending on how you input the value, currency formatting might appear differently than in the different Price fields).
Here's an example of how to set the prices in Ad Copy using "Current Price" or a custom label.
For Image Templates, we recommend that you use the "Sale Price" field for the creative to avoid updates on the image template later on. DO NOT use "Current Price" in your Image Templates for sales seasons in order to avoid unnecessary last minute updating (as the value is fetched differently than in ad copy)
Here's an example of using "Sale Price" in image templates.
Clean up Pixel events and catalog matching
Do a website Pixel and mobile SDK audit to make sure you are accurately tracking all of your signals and that they are firing on correct website/app pages. Check your Events Manager for opportunities to improve the signals you’re tracking.
Review your event priority well in advance, as changes can take some time to apply.
Check Catalog Manager and ensure your match rate is as close to 100% as possible for View Content, Add-to-Cart and Purchase events.
If you are running a sale on a few selected brands, categories, or products, create product sets ahead of time to ensure feed image approval and learnings (the earlier, the better).
Turn on Automatic Advanced Matching to increase your match rate, increases your custom audience sizes and for better attribution. Here's how you turn on Advanced Matching in Meta:
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In Meta Business Manager, go to Events Manager > Data Sources.
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Select your Pixel.
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Go to Settings.
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Toggle on Automatic Advanced Matching.
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Check catalog health and performance
Make sure there are no errors in image templates processing. Check out the article Diagnose Image Template issues in dynamic ads to find out how image templates are used in Dynamic Ads and get tips for solving any issues.
Verify that there are no errors or warnings in the feed uploads (if there are fatal errors the product information of those products will not be updated to catalog). More information can be found in this knowledge base article.
You can remove unused image templates to make the feed processing faster.
The Knowledge Base article "Decreasing feed processing times for large catalogs" gives other good tips to improve the catalog processing performance.
3-5 days before: Create campaigns and ads
Getting delivery is extremely important on the key sales days, but the competition is way more fierce than usual. Don't worry, you can make many kinds of improvements from ad formats to bidding strategies to ensure that you are set up for success.
Check account spend limits
Make sure to check ad account spending limits so you don't accidentally stop delivering.
These spend limits are found in the ad platform's business manager section.
Level up your campaign configuration
Leverage Automatic placements with all ad sets. Select as many placements as possible for all ad sets to allow the ad platform to automatically optimize for the best performing placements.
Include multiple ad formats in each ad set. This lets the ad platform optimize ads for each user better. Use a mix of collections, stories, carousels, videos, and link ads.
Go broad with audiences. Don't over-segment your targeting, or you'll end up with hyper-competitive audiences.
Create combinations of multiple lookalike audiences and lookalikes with higher percentages. In Smartly, you can go up to 20% lookalike.
Only use broad targeting (age, gender, language) for Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences. Further granularity (such as lookalikes or interests) will only hinder performance.
Consider a time-based retargeting strategy based on the seasonal campaign. It can be effective to retarget shoppers that already converted during a particular season to upsell higher-valued deals or cross-sell other product categories.
To maximize delivery, consider running regular conversion campaigns alongside your Dynamic Ads campaigns. It’s easier to scale up significantly by running regular conversion campaigns in addition to Dynamic Ads vs. running only Dynamic Ads, as they rely on catalog signals.
Supercharge your bidding and budgets
Bid boldly using "Cost per result goal", and set an aggressive cap. Don’t use Lowest Cost without bid cap, which might react too slowly to changes in the auction market to actually win auctions.
Be prepared to increase your bid cap up to 3-5x your average CPA.
Note: as long as you are bidding boldly enough, you will likely also see a higher conversion rate than usually as well.
Changing bid strategy in an existing campaign will cause the learnings to reset. Be prepared to change the strategy days in advance if you are currently using Cost per result goal.
Increase bid cap and budget in daily chunks before Black Friday. A 20-30% daily increase may offset the learning phase.
Use only bid OR budget to control delivery. Make sure the other is high enough to not be the limiting factor.
3-5 days before: Create all ads
We strongly recommend creating your ads well in advance of the actual main sales day. Video ads, for example, can sometimes take a long time approve. Starting to build your ads well ahead of the actual sales day gives you time to react to any disapprovals or other issues.
Before the sales period starts, consider running separate ads announcing your upcoming sales to prime potential customers. They might not convert directly on a sale if they aren’t familiar with your brand.
Create your sale campaigns 3-5 days before the go live date with a start time on the go live date. Ad approval can take up to 48 hours. This way, you can deal with any ad disapprovals in time.
Instead of changing the image template during the sales period, it's better to create separate ads with the right image templates and active/pause the wanted ads. This way you will avoid the ad review at a critical time.
To automate ads management, you can set up triggers to pause your regular creatives for Black Friday. When the sales period is over, it's easy to set them active again.
Use Image and Video Templates that are tailored to action. Highlight the promotion (Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.) and make the discount prominent in your creatives. Remember our Video Template presets - they will help you automate the creative process.
During the sales period: Monitor and optimize
Although all your assets have been prepped well in advance, you can't just sit back and relax on the actual sales day. Sorry!
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As soon as your campaign reaches the minimum conversions required, use Lookalike Expansion. You can even automate this with a trigger.
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Set up triggers with notifications to monitor if your ad sets are failing to deliver so you can identify problems quickly and fix them. Don’t be afraid to aggressively increase bids and budgets if they seem to restrict delivery.
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If your campaigns last longer than 1 day, use Facebook's Campaign Budget Optimization or Predictive Budget Allocation with attribution 1 day click-through, 1 day view-through (as in such sales the amount of daily conversions should be enough) and consider adding budget scaling. See section 5 below for campaigns lasting 1 day or less.
And last but not least, use Campaigns reporting to monitor your campaign results. Here are some useful views you can create:
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Monitor daily performance focusing on CPA levels and CTR for creatives
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Account time hourly breakdown to see how much you are spending per hour and make sure that everything is delivering and things are not slowing down. Remember you can change bids and budgets as well as update statuses from Pivot Tables.
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Check your spend pacing with a graph with hourly breakdown. You can also use daily breakdown instead of hourly breakdown if your action is not very short in time and you don’t require such a detailed analysis.
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Check your analytics metrics (like sessions, engagement and bounces) to monitor how the web traffic develops.
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How to optimize if campaigns last 1 day or less
Campaigns that only last one day or less are somewhat special. A lot of the regular optimization tactics do not apply, simply because you don't have time to see if they work.
One strategy is to use triggers to apply agile changes and ensure delivery. Here are some examples of triggers adapted to flash sales.
For more insights on flash sales, read our blog post.