Q4 is the most critical time for ecommerce, and your Google Ads strategy needs to be ready. That’s why I’ve put together the Google Ads Q4 2024 Ecommerce Strategy Checklist – your go-to guide for boosting performance and maximizing profit during the busiest shopping season of the year.
Whether it’s managing budgets for Black Friday, optimizing bids, or ensuring your best-sellers stay in stock, this checklist covers the essentials to keep your campaigns efficient and effective.
If you want to make sure your ads are ready to perform, this checklist has you covered.
1. Budget Management
- Ensure your daily budget is high enough to capture demand, especially on major sales days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day).
- Check campaign performance hourly or several times per day during major events.
- Avoid overspending: Monitor cost-per-click (CPC) and sales conversions.
- Tighten TROAS % if focusing solely on profit.
- Drop budgets immediately after sales events to avoid overspending due to overbidding by Google.
- Make small budget adjustments (5-20%) but increase flexibility during Q4.
- Ensure budgets are evenly spent across multiple locations, if applicable.
2. Bidding Strategies
- Monitor target ROAS and lower it during high competition periods like BFCM.
- Increase ROAS post-sales events to control spending.
- Regularly adjust bidding settings (TCPA, Max Clicks, etc.) based on performance.
- Make frequent, small bidding adjustments unless performance significantly drops.
3. Merchant Center Products & Ads Uptime
- Daily checks for disapprovals of ads or products.
- Use scripts for disapproved products or ads, but don’t rely on them during key sales periods.
4. Sales & Profit Focus
- Analyse top-level profitability more frequently.
- Focus on high-margin products or collections.
- Add Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) into your feed & monitor Profit On Ad Spend (POAS)
- Check Average Order Value (AOV) and Revenue per Visitor at campaign and item levels.
- Ensure tracking accuracy and compare to your main source of truth (e.g., Shopify dashboard).
5. Stock Levels
- Monitor stock of best-sellers and adjust spend to avoid overselling out-of-stock items.
- Consider alternative or substitute products if a best-seller runs out of stock.
- Adjust spending if restocking is delayed or impacts profit margins.
6. Basic Q4 Google Ads Strategy
- Set up Catch-All Pmax (Feed Only) and/or Standard Shopping Campaign.
- Ensure Branded Search Campaign is live.
7. Advanced Google Ads Strategy
- Include:
- Ensure sales-specific campaigns like Display Banners and YouTube ads promote sales events.
8. How to Handle Promotions
- Create promotion extensions in Google Merchant Center for sales events.
- Create promotion extensions in Google Ads assets.
- Update ad copy with sale-specific wording (e.g., Black Friday 20% Off).
- Add sales-specific assets to campaigns at least 48 hours prior to the event.
- Warm up audiences using Demand Gen, YouTube, and Display campaigns.
9. Introducing New/Seasonal Products
- Create a separate campaign for new products to generate initial data.
- Cycle new products out of the dedicated campaign once they gain traction.
10. Bricks & Mortar Sales
- Use Pmax or Shopping campaigns, adding a location radius around your physical store.
- Maximise ad spend after delivery cut-off to capture local in-store sales.
- Ensure Google My Business location directions are added as a conversion event.
- Set up local search campaigns with relevant keywords (e.g., “bike shop near me”).
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