Sneaker marketing agency

Shopping for sneakers works when each size is its own offer in the feed and the campaign structure separates inline models from launch product. For inline styles we run Performance Max or Standard Shopping by silhouette, with feed rules that pause a variant when its size sells out so budget stops going to a page with a greyed-out button. For launch product we do the opposite: Shopping is switched off until the drop time, because a product that shows in Shopping before it can be bought creates clicks that cannot convert and reviews that mention frustration.

Search ads cover model names, colourway nicknames and the brand plus 'restock'. We add negative keywords for resale terms and for other brands' silhouettes, which otherwise drain budget from anyone with a well-known model name. Price extensions and merchant promotions show the retail price, which matters when the same shoe is listed elsewhere at a markup.

We also watch the counterfeit and misrepresentation side of Google's policies closely. A sneaker brand advertising its own product is fine, but a listing with vague brand fields or missing GTINs can be flagged, and a flagged Merchant Center account during a drop week is expensive.

Sneaker creative on Meta and TikTok has one job in the week before a drop: make the audience remember the date and the model. On-foot video, detail shots of the materials, the colourway against daylight. We run the announcement to your existing customers and site visitors first, then to lookalikes built from buyers of the same silhouette, then broad. The teaser sequence ends with a reminder ad on the morning of the drop and a restock ad the day sizes come back.

Between drops, social carries the inline catalogue through Advantage+ catalogue ads, where each colourway is a product in the catalogue and the ad shows the one the viewer looked at. The feed behind those ads is the same one that feeds Shopping, so size and stock accuracy carries across.

TikTok in particular rewards creator content that shows the shoe being worn and styled rather than shot in a studio. We brief creators on the fit note and the colourway story, not on a script, and we track which creator content pulls people to the product page rather than which one gets views. Policy-wise, the main thing to avoid is any implication of affiliation with a larger sneaker brand you are not affiliated with. Comparison to other brands in ad copy is both a policy and a taste problem.

A sneaker feed in Merchant Center has to carry a lot of variant data. Each size is a separate item with its own offer ID, all sharing an item_group_id for the colourway. Size goes in the size attribute, and because sneakers are usually cut on a men's last and sold as unisex, we set gender to unisex and use size_system to state whether the size is US, UK or EU. Where you list both men's and women's conversions, we keep one canonical system in the feed and put the conversion in the product page rather than in the feed, so Google does not see two conflicting sizes for one item.

Google requires age_group, gender, colour and size for apparel and footwear in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan and Brazil, so those fields are not optional. Colour is where colourway nicknames become a problem: Google wants a plain colour like 'white' or 'green', not the nickname, so the nickname goes in the title and the plain colour goes in the colour field.

For launch product, availability is set to preorder with an availability_date, then flipped to in_stock at drop time. That keeps the listing eligible without letting it show as buyable early. GTINs matter for own-label too. If you do not have them, we set identifier_exists to false rather than leave the field blank.

A sneaker brand's SEO is mostly about owning its own model names and colourway names before a resale site or a blog does. Each silhouette gets a hub page that outlives any single colourway, with the colourways as product pages underneath it. When a colourway sells out, the product page stays live with a notify-me form instead of returning a 404, because the search demand for that colourway continues for months after the drop.

The fit question is what shoppers now ask AI assistants: 'does the [model] run small', 'should I size up in the [model]', 'is the [model] wide'. We write a fit note per silhouette in plain sentences on the product page, and a longer sizing page per model that answers those exact questions. Assistants pull from pages that state the answer directly, so the note says 'this model runs about half a size small, most buyers size up' when that is true, rather than 'fits true to size' on every page.

Collection pages are organised by silhouette and by use, not only by gender. Structured data covers each variant with size and availability, which is what lets Google show the size grid in search results.

Email and SMS are where sneaker brands leave the most money. The list is treated as one audience and every drop goes to everyone, so the customer who only wears one silhouette in one size gets fifteen irrelevant messages and stops opening. We segment the list by what each person bought or clicked, and the drop alert for a silhouette goes first to people who own that silhouette, then to people who browsed it, then to everyone else.

Restock alerts are the most valuable message you can send. When a size comes back, the people who asked for that size get an SMS within minutes, before the general email. This is a small flow that produces sales at the highest conversion rate of anything in the account.

Post-purchase, the sequence covers the care and the laces, then the second colourway of the same model about the time the first pair has been worn in. There is no fixed reorder cycle in sneakers the way there is in running shoes, so the trigger is the next release in a silhouette the customer already owns, not a calendar date. We also run a win-back for customers who bought once and never opened another drop, pointing them to the model they bought and what has changed since.