Best Practices for Key Sales Periods

Advice: Launch your campaign and line items at least a week before the period.

• This allows the bidding optimization models time to calibrate.

• In fact, the line item learning phase starts whenever you select the Conversions or Revenue Optimizer. The optimizer will take 7-10 days on average before reaching maximum efficiency. We recommend you do NOT change your line-item bid settings during the learning curve and anticipate Key sales periods by creating campaigns in advance. If you change your bids too often, the prediction algorithm will become less efficient as it will have less data to optimize towards. 

Advice: Submit keywords at least 3 business days before the period with the submit keyword tool in line item settings. 

• You can manually submit new terms in addition to the automatically associated ones. Submitted keywords must be relevant and can not target competitor names or keywords. Submitted keywords are subject to review, can vary by placement at the retailer's discretion, and are not guaranteed to be approved or applied to your line item. 

Advice: Make sure your PDP pages on retailer websites are clean and up to date. 

• The quality of these pages can impact factors that are taken into the bidding models, as higher quality pages with clear product images and descriptions can lead to higher engagement, etc. 

• This advice is both for your Criteo campaigns and for maximizing your SEO. 

• Quality Score is a diagnostic tool meant to give a sense of how your ad quality compares to other advertisers. The higher the Quality Score, the more relevant and useful your ad is to the shopper. 

Advice: Make sure you have enough products by category, as some may go out of stock.

When products go out of stock, they stop serving. Don't hesitate to maximize and increase the number of products in your campaigns to compensate for potential stock shortages. This ensures your brand’s visibility, even during periods where inventory levels rapidly change.  

Advice: Maximize your number of products per category. 

Some retailers require a minimum of as many as 5 products to serve advertising on their site.

This will allow you to ensure your products are visible when you are in a niche category, and capture as many ad placements as possible compared to your competitors in very competitive categories. 

Advice: Organize your line items according to your strategies.

Group your products by strategy. For example, you can choose to target branded keywords for some products and unbranded keywords for others. You could also bid higher on upper funnel placements, like a homepage, or lower funnel tactics closer to the purchase. 

Some examples of groupings can be found below: 

• You can group products by category if you have a different strategy for each category of your brand. 

• You can group products by price range if you have large price differences in your products, and that implies a different strategy. 

• You can group them by premium and loss leader products. 

• You can group products by Hero vs Newness. 

• You can group them with big promotions on one side and new products on the other. 

Advice: Do not adjust optimizer settings during sales period.

• It is important not to adjust the line item's optimizer settings (such as switching from Conversion to Revenue optimizer mid-sales period). 

• Be careful with your capping and make sure line item or campaign caps do not conflict and cause you to misspend opportunities by being too restrictive.