Now is the time to check your allocation of non-brand budgets across shopping and search. If you’re seeing disparate CPAs or ROAS across these channels it could be time to rethink your budget allocation.
Many have shifted the bulk of their non-brand spend to shopping as the CPCs are more efficient.
You can take this further and look at the device, followed by location and audience. Do note that allocation across channel (shopping/search) followed by device will have the most impact. The ideal outcome is that your CPA should be near identical no matter if it’s mobile shopping or desktop search.
Check last year’s Cyber weekend for improved conversion rates on mobile. For a very large American retailer I worked on last year during the Black Five-day I saw mobile conversion rates on par with desktop so there was no reason to bid down.
If mobile conversion rates are on par with desktop by lunchtime Black Friday that’s a good indicator you can loosen up the reins on mobile for the weekend. It’s likely people already know what they want and are waiting with phone in hand to take you up on your cyber deal. Get with your team and plan a schedule for morning, noon, and evening checks through the weekend so you know who is looking after things and what to be aware of.
Eric Dick – Search & Display Marketing Manager
D’Artagnan
As Black Friday / Cyber Monday has become such a strong and global consumerism event, customers have learned to hold on to their wallets during the time leading up to the big discounts weekend. This anticipation period usually manifests itself in lower conversion rates so, adjusting spending levels and bids down might seem like a sensible action. I’d argue that during this period it is critical to maintain at least the same level of online presence for two main reasons: you don’t want to miss out on capturing customers in their consideration stage of the purchase journey; it’s a golden opportunity to build up your remarketing pool.
With that in mind, announcing your brand’s participation on this promotional period and building up the momentum can help locking down some of the upcoming demand; and as far as remarketing goes, there isn’t a single marketing channel that can’t benefit from a more tailored message and a hyper focused ad delivery to a highly qualified traffic. Furthermore, those remarketing audiences can prove very valuable particularly for sales not realized during BF, as Christmas is just a few weeks away, thus giving brands another opportunity to engage with prospecting customers.
Amazon
Amazon’s advertising landscape is changing. More and more advertisers are jumping on board, and Sponsored Products Ads placements are becoming harder to win, and obviously more expensive. As a less crowded type of ad, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sponsored Brands – and/or even Sponsored Display – becomes a more important source of revenue, already in this year’s holiday season.
Feeds
Promotional prices need to be reflected on the feed as soon as they’re changed on your website, so coordination with the person/team in charge of those changes is key. And, whether or not you have plenty of stock for your promoted products, it’s a good idea to review the feed’s refreshing schedule on the Merchant Center so that is updated more frequently. Depending on the size of your product portfolio, and your campaign structure, it might also be a good idea to pause any non-promoted products that can cannibalize on the impression share of promoted SKUs.
Ad Copy
In terms of actions, one of my favourites, and relatively easy to implement, is to tweak the ad copy to create a sense of urgency. Fortunately, there’s plenty of features and actions that can go a long way in capturing your audience’s attention (and clicks):
-Including Black Friday references in headlines
-Setting up promotion extensions for search
-Implementing countdown ad customizers, either for the end of the promotional period or for inventory available
Ricardo Figueiredo – Paid Media Manager
Bang & Olufsen
If you’re not utilizing Google Showcase campaigns, you should be. They’re easy to set up, simple to manage and provide greater visibility for your brand and products to consumers higher up the funnel. According to Google, 48% of shoppers are open to buying from new retailers during the holiday season. That’s an opportunity you can’t afford to miss.
David Sodemann – Paid Shopping Lead
etrailer
Brian Roizen is the Cofounder and Chief Architect of Feedonomics, a full-service feed optimization platform that optimizes product data for hundreds of channels. He has been featured on numerous podcasts and eCommerce webinars, and regularly contributes to Search Engine Land and other industry-leading blogs. Brian graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering.
