Many things go into preparing for the busy holiday season. Planning budgets for big days, sometimes down to the hour, can be time intensive but can have a large pay off. Reviewing bidding strategies to make sure automation will adjust properly on high volume days will be a headache but is a must.

When it comes to preparations involving your programs that leverage a product feed, rest assured that VersaFeed is at your disposal throughout the holiday season to assist in updates, changes and ad hoc shifts in strategy.

Here are some product feed related considerations to get you ahead of the game:

• Review and address product warnings and disapprovals in the GMC Diagnostics and Meta Issues sections.
• Ensure you are opted-in to all Free Listings and taking full advantage of this opportunity from Google
• Explore holiday themed creative options for product images. This can easily be done in Facebook’s Dynamic Frames to add a holiday image overlay.
• Compare high volume relevant terms to utilize best words to use in product titles.

• Map out your promotion schedule and make sure you know which ones are eligible for Google’s Merchant Promotions. Have a plan for when each applicable Merchant Center Promotion would need to be set-up (up to 72 hours prior) and make sure you know what items are eligible for each Merchant Promotion.
• Consider using a Custom Label based strategy for:
  • Singling out products part of an exclusive promotion
  • Isolating products that are most competitively priced across Google
  • Narrowing down your top performing products based on real-time Google ads performance data for a “Best-Sellers” campaign.
• Identify your shipping deadlines for Christmas so you can take advantage of Google’s Holiday shipping cutoff features in the GMC under shipping settings.
• If you offer free shipping and can deliver within 3 business days or sooner - make sure you participate in Google’s Fast and Free Shipping Annotations.
• Know your troubleshooting escalation plan – VersaFeed will be a great resource for you for your data feed related issues.