Is a peak sales season approaching soon? Are you running flash sales and worrying that you might forget something? This article guides you through the most critical items to check so you are technically prepared for any peak season and can get the best possible results!
1. Validate catalogs and Pixel setup
Recommended timeframe: 7–14 days before the go live date
First and foremost, you need to make sure your basic setup is done correctly, and that your critical assets are in place. We highly recommended you do the things covered in section one well ahead of the actual sales dates as doing last minute fixes to these critical things can be very hard.
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The most important thing to remember is to create your FINALIZED image templates several days before your holiday season campaign goes live!
- Facebook’s processing has an increased load during the holiday season, so this ensures that all products have the right promotional template available.
- It's enough that you create the templates into the catalog well ahead of time, you can then switch the creatives to use the right template at the right time later.
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We strongly advise against using countdown fields in Image Templates during the holiday season as this can cause significant under-delivery of ads.
- Countdowns trigger a reprocessing of the image, and Facebook needs to re-upload (and re-approve) this new creative before that product can deliver again. As processing delays can be significant during peak holiday sales periods, using countdowns can thus prevent delivery of several catalog products for extended periods (several hours or even days).
- Good to note, that any change (manual or automatic from feed) on fields used within the ad (including the image) will push the product to review, during which, the product is not shown in the ads. When editing image template designs, you can avoid unnecessary feed updates by using the “Disable automatic feed uploads after image templates edits” functionality.
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Ideally, your catalogs should be at least 1 month old
- so that they have gathered enough data to inform the Meta algorithm.
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Consider enabling Catalog Alerts
- You'll receive an email notification if the catalog processing fails.
1.1. Product catalog prices
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Did you know that you can pre-program price changes without the need to make massive catalog refreshes last minute? We recommend that you DO NOT change the product “Price” field in your catalog to contain your special offer prices. All you need to do is to map the deal price to the "Sale Price" column in your Feed. You can also set the "Sales Effective Date" to define when this price is available. For more information on how to format Sales Effective Date, see Optional General Feed Fields -> sale_price_effective_date.
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For ad copy text, you can then use "Current Price" - {{product.current_price}} - to show the special offer price.
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If you haven't provided "Sales Effective Date", Current Price will always show the value you have mapped to "Sale Price".
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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.
- ALTERNATIVE APPROACH: 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).
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Example: How to set the prices in Ad Copy using "Current Price" or a custom label.
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For Image Templates, we recommend that you use the "Sale Price" field for the creative so you don't need to run any 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)
Example: How to set the prices in Image Templates using "Sale Price".
1.2. Pixel events and catalog matching
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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 to see if there are any opportunities to improve the signals you’re tracking.
- Review your event priority well in advance, as changes can take some time to apply.
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Check Catalog Manager and ensure your match rate is as close to 100% as possible for View Content, Add-to-Cart and Purchase events.
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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).
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Turn on Automatic Advanced Matching to increase your match rate, increases your custom audience sizes and for better attribution. You can turn on Advanced Matching by following these steps in Business Manager:
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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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1.3. Catalog health and performance
- Make sure there are no errors in image templates processing. This article helps in solving the issues and gives more information how image templates are used in dynamic ads.
- 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 from a catalog to make the feed processing faster.
- Knowledge Base article "Decreasing feed processing times for large catalogs" highlights other good tips to improve the catalog processing performance.
2. Ensure delivery with proper campaign setup
Recommended timeframe: Create campaigns & ads 3-5 days before go live date
Getting delivery is extremely important on the key sales days. However, there is also much more competition than normally. There are several types of improvements you can make, from ad formats to bidding strategies, to ensure that you are set up for success.
2.1. Account spend limits
- Make sure to check ad account spending limits so you don't accidentally stop delivering (these can be checked from Facebook Business Manager)
2.2. Campaign configuration
- Leverage Automatic placements with all ad sets. Simply select as many placements as possible for all ad sets to allow Facebook to automatically optimize for the best performing placements.
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Include multiple ad formats in each ad set. This lets Facebook optimize ads for each user better. Use for example collections, stories, carousels, videos, and link ads with square image.
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Go broad with audiences vs. overly-segmenting your targeting to avoid hyper-competitive audiences.
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Create combinations of multiple lookalike audiences and lookalikes with higher percentages. In Smartly.io, you can go up to 20% lookalike.
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Only use broad targeting (age, gender, language) for Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences. Further granularity (such as lookalikes or interests) will only hinder performance.
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Consider a Black Friday week/weekend time-based retargeting strategy: It can be effective to retarget shoppers that already converted on Black Friday 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.
2.3. Bidding and budgets
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Bid boldly using Lowest Cost with Bid Cap, and set an aggressive cap. Don’t use Lowest Cost without bid cap as it might react too slowly to the change in the auction market to actually win auctions during these peak periods. 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 Lowest Cost without a bid cap.
- Increase bid cap and budget in daily chunks before Black Friday. A 20-30% daily increase may offset the learning phase.
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Use only bid OR budget to control delivery. Make sure the other is high enough to not be the limiting factor.
3. Create all ads in advance
Recommended timeframe: Create campaigns & ads 3-5 days before go live date.
We strongly recommend creating your ads well in advance of the actual main sales day. For example, video ads can sometimes take a long time approve, so starting to build your ads well ahead of the actual sales day gives you time to react to any disapprovals, etc.
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(Optional) Before the sales period starts, consider running separate ads announcing your upcoming sales to prime potential customers as they might not convert directly on a sale if they aren’t familiar with your brand.
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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 and this ensures you can deal with any ad disapprovals in time.
- To automate ads management, you can set up triggers to pause your regular creatives for Black Friday, then set activate them again after the sales period is over.
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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 that we have seasonal Video Template presets that will help you automate the creative process.
4. Monitor and optimize during sales days
Once all of your assets have been prepared well in advance of the actual sales day, there is still the actual day to take care of. Remember the following tactics during the event day.
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Use Lookalike Expansion as soon as your campaign has reached the minimum conversions required (100). 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.
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Use Campaigns reporting to monitor your campaigns’ 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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Add Google Analytics metrics (like GA: Sessions or GA: Bounces) to monitor how the web traffic develops.
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5. How to optimize if campaigns last 1 day or less?
Campaigns that only last one day or less are somewhat special as a lot of the regular optimization tactics do not apply simply because you do not have time to see if they work. You can find a few quick tips below. For more insights on flash sales, read our blog post.
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Create triggers to apply agile changes and ensure delivery. Here are some examples of triggers adapted to flash sales.
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Use Stop-loss, as it takes into account short-term fluctuations in performance.