Promotions best practices

This article will help ensure that your sales and promotions are as effective as possible by outlining recommended best practices.

On this page

• The basics
• Ramp up your promotions strategy
• Prepare for the festive season
• Be ready to adjust in real time

The basics

If you're a US retailer participating in Shopping ads or free product listings, providing competitive pricing with sales and discounts, or offering promotions will automatically make your products eligible for increased visibility. In addition, these best practices can help drive better performance and incremental conversions, plus help you make the most of festive sales events.

Ramp up your promotions strategy

A little work can go a long way when it comes to the visibility and effectiveness of your promotions.

• Familiarise yourself with promotions to ensure smooth promotional launches.
• Provide structured data for your promotions through the Merchant Center promotion builder tool to facilitate faster reviews and approvals.
• Ensure that your promotions are viewable as quickly as possible by selecting promotional products in your product data source.
• Ensure that your titles are specific, accurate and easy to understand. Your promotions will be displayed under the 'Coupons from shop' section, so the more specific your promotion titles are, the easier it will be for your customers to find them.
• Include the name or type of product in your promotion title. See examples below:
  • Yes: '20% off baby trainers only.'
    This title details the specific category that's eligible for coupons or discounts.
  • No: '20% off selected products.'
    This title makes it difficult for customers to identify if the type of product that they're interested in is included in your promotion.
• Keep your historical promotions approval rate as high as possible, and make sure that you're following the latest promotion policies.
• Tag your on sale and promotional products with a custom label attribute for better reporting and results analysis down the line.
  • Only tag products that are on sale or being promoted so your data is as accurate as possible. You can use a maximum of five custom labels for reporting and ads bidding.
• Remove stale promotions and ensure promo freshness to maximise their impact and avoid exceeding active promotion limits unnecessarily.
• Avoid duplicate promotions linked to a single offer: Create promotions that can be mapped to multiple offers.
  • If you have more than 1,000 offers associated with your promotion, avoid using the item ID filter for mapping and instead add the promotion ID attribute in the product data source that allows you to map more than 1,000 offers to one promotion.
• Resolve any questions that you might have by contacting the promotions support team.

Prepare for the festive season

The festive season is a critical time of the year for many retailers. Be prepared and make the most of the opportunity.

• Plan ahead and establish clear marketing objectives and targets.
• Focus on keeping your product data accurate and utilise the sale price [sale_price] attribute.
• Keep your inventory and prices fresh with automatic item updates.

Be ready to adjust in real time

Continuously monitor your promotional performance to understand what's working, and adapt accordingly.

• Change sales and promotion end dates if you're running low on inventory.
• Adjust your promotional strategies if you find that certain parameters drive higher engagement or ROI.
• During the festive season or other seasonal spikes, ensure that your campaigns have uncapped budgets to capture the full demand.