Prepare before traffic increases

Whether you're planning for Black Friday, seasonal promotions or a major product launch, campaign performance can change dramatically in just a few hours.

Rather than constantly checking reports, identify the areas most likely to affect performance and set up monitoring before demand peaks.

1. Set alerts for critical checks

During busy trading periods, small issues can quickly become expensive. Monitor:

• Budget-limited campaigns

• Performance Max channel distribution as spend ramps up

• Landing page issues as website changes occur more often

• Disapproved ads, keywords, and products

• Best practice setting application on new campaigns

• Negative keyword coverage - are the necessary shared library lists attached to new campaigns 

• As volume increases, watch for negative conflicts: newly added keywords can be inadvertently blocked by existing negatives

Being alerted as issues happen means less time manually checking dashboards and more time taking action.

Squared.io tip: Squared.io continuously monitors your accounts and alerts you to recommendations when the above needs attention while automatically implementing best practice set up.

2. Keep your product feed healthy

For Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, your product feed is just as important as your campaign settings.

• Feed data changes constantly during a sale - monitor disapprovals, demotions, and warnings to ensure products with high intent aren’t missing revenue

• Product availability fluctuates constantly during sale periods - cross-check delivery against out-of-stock and discontinued product reports

Resolving these issues quickly helps ensure your best-selling products remain eligible throughout your busiest trading periods.

3. Cut inefficient spend before it compounds

Higher search volumes often introduce new search behaviour. Review:

• High-spend search queries and negative keyword opportunities

• Poor-performing keywords and products depleting budget

• Performance Max search queries and N-gram trends

Cleaning up irrelevant traffic helps ensure more of your budget reaches customers who are ready to convert.

Squared.io tip: Squared.io analyses non-converting keywords, products, and queries alongside search themes to help identify and apply new negative keyword opportunities.

4. Watch for expansion opportunities, not just risk

Peak trading isn't just about fixing problems. Keep an eye out for:

• New high-performing search queries to expand keyword coverage.

• Products gaining unexpected demand that could be reprioritised based on your structure.

• Competitor or market trends worth expanding into.

• Low-reach campaigns, ad groups, and keywords losing impressions, and on campaigns newly hitting budget caps - both become more common as competition for the same auctions increases.

Demand shifts quickly during peak periods, so successful teams look for opportunities as well as risks.

6. Focus on what matters most

Not every recommendation has the same priority during peak trading. Instead of trying to optimise everything, focus on the issues most likely to impact reach and revenue. Lower-priority optimisations can wait until trading returns to normal.

Squared.io tip: Squared.io allows teams to prioritise the recommendations that matter most during peak periods, helping them focus on the changes with the greatest potential impact while temporarily deprioritising less urgent optimisation tasks.

How Squared.io helps

Squared.io continuously monitors Google Ads accounts throughout peak trading periods, automatically surfacing budget limitations, campaign performance changes, search query trends, Merchant Center issues, feed health and landing page problems. By combining proactive alerts with actionable recommendations, teams can spend less time manually checking dashboards and more time responding to the issues that matter most.

See how Squared.io supported THG during the busy peak sales period by automating critical checks, reducing manual workload, and helping the team focus on performance-driving optimisations.