Black Friday eCommerce Tips – Eliance Health Solutions, KlientBoost, and The Next Ad

It’s time to start planning your eCommerce campaigns for the holiday season. We’ve collected tips from Eliance Health Solutions, KlientBoost, and The Next Ad on the best ways to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

In order to successfully market your brand for Black Friday weekend, it is important to incorporate key learnings from your previous campaigns. Make sure to start planning in the months prior to this holiday weekend to ensure you have the staff, inventory, and capabilities to sustain your business during this time. If you are investing in digital media to promote your brand, ensure any special sales and exclusive discounts are promoted weeks or even months in advance of the weekend. Consider extending your Cyber Monday promotions for a few extra days to keep pace with the competition and provide your loyal customers with exclusive pricing. Many retailers start promotions a few days in advance of Black Friday and extend discounts and free shipping beyond Cyber Monday. Keep this in mind when creating special offers for email campaigns and social media. Good luck this holiday season!

Erica Brandt – Public Relations and Marketing Professional 
Eliance Health Solutions 

Make sure your top-performing products are appearing for your best-performing searches. There are two steps to accomplish this.

First, dedicate a shopping campaign to your top-performing products if you don’t already have one. (Hint: if you don’t know what your top-performing products are, you can always go to Google Analytics > conversions > eCommerce > product performance, and sort by revenue.)

When you set up a shopping campaign dedicated to your top 5-15 best-sellers, we recommend structuring this type of campaign with SPAGs (single-product ad groups) to help you easily manage bids and search terms for each product.

Second, use a multi-campaign Shopping structure to get around the limitations of Shopping campaigns and target specific search terms. At KlientBoost, we call this the Gold Pan Technique.

As an example, you can create a duplicate of your existing shopping campaign, give the newer campaign a lower priority setting and higher bids, and assign the campaigns a shared budget. Then, create a negative keyword list, add your highest performing search terms to that list, and apply the list only to your higher priority Shopping campaign. The higher priority campaign will absorb all traffic first, but your preferred search terms – the gold nuggets – will get pushed to your lower priority Shopping campaign helping you show your best-selling products against your best-converting searches.

Reese Garcia – Director of eCommerce
KlientBoost

My ultimate tip to rock the Black Friday weekend is to leverage from automatic optimisation when running digital advertising campaigns. Running either Google, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube campaigns, prices and competition will increase tremendously during the Holiday Season. Smart optimisation, which are algorithms built for the best performance, will automatically move, increase or decrease budgets for the best performance based on actual and accurate results. No human being has so many insights on the spot as a machine, as well as the ability to optimise 24/7 on the spot. Especially with high competition and increased required costs, investing in the most valuable keywords or target audience serves you best results during the holiday season.

Sanne Kruis – Marketing Manager
The Next Ad