My absolute top tip for eCommerce websites in the lead up to Black Friday weekend and the holidays would be to have a fast mobile-friendly website. With mobile now taking over 50% of online usage stats, it’s essential your online shop looks great and functions exceptionally well on mobile devices. If your mobile website is hard to use and takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’re going to lose customers. So what is the best way to test your online shop? To check it out on your mobile yourself and if possible, ask friends/family or a wider audience for their honest feedback. Even shaving a few seconds off your load time, fixing up a broken link or enlarging the text can be the difference between no sale and a sale.
Casey Bryan – SEO & Google Ads Specialist
Grand Cru Digital
In regards to traditional search ads in Google, the best piece of advice I can give for Black Friday is to have your ad extensions up to date and set up properly. Your ad extensions include promotion extensions, site links, callouts, structured snippets, and more. When looking at in more in-depth, there are three imperative factors of your ad extensions that must be considered for a successful Black Friday campaign:
Promotion Extensions
Use them! Promotion extensions will allow you to enter your exact promos for each of your Black Friday sales. The benefits include listing your sale, a link that will lead right to the product/sale page on your site, and a promotion window that will include the date the promotion expires which helps to build urgency and ultimately drive the sale.
Organization
It is crucial that your ad extensions are organized by ad group during Black Friday so that they are relevant to each product, keyword, and search term. Relevancy is one of the most important factors in click-through rate, ad ranking, and driving conversions. Plus, updating your ad extensions to show at the ad group level can be a lot more efficient and a quicker process than updating the ad copy alone for those accounts that have 100s or 1,000s of ads.
Correct Info
Check, double-check, and check again. An error in regards to a promotional price or discount listed in your extensions can be a costly mistake for high traffic sites, especially eCommerce. Have your account manager check promotional prices and product info listed in callouts to avoid having to honor incorrect prices or issue refunds.
Robby Hamoud – Paid Strategy Digital Manager
Click Bro Digital
Black Friday is a crowded web of discount after discount and the belief is that to stand out you need to be offering the biggest discount. You need to think about Black Friday or Grey November as it has now become as a time when audiences are primed to purchase. Think about your audience and how you can engage them in a way that isn’t about price – what are your company’s purpose and vision and how can you reinforce that over this time? For example brands like Patagonia in the past have used black Friday to reinforce its sustainability credentials by donating all sales revenue on that day to relevant charities and environmental organisations. Not a discount in sight. Think differently and think about what your audiences want and develop a campaign that stands out from all those discounters.
David Schulhof – CEO
Red Hot Penny
See more tips from D’Artagnan, Bang & Olufsen, and 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.
