With Black Friday quickly approaching, PPC managers have to prepare for the incoming wave of traffic and sales. Here’s a small checklist that I use every year for this season:
- Budgets – Manage your November budgets appropriately. If you have budget limits be sure to hold back a percentage of your budget so you can increase your spend on the Black Friday weekend.
- Ads – Create or activate Black Friday / Cyber Monday ads. Be sure to use labels to make it super easy to pause and active these ads. Also, be sure to use all available functionality like countdown timers and ad customizers.
- Extensions – Edit your extensions and use all available extension functionality. This is even more important during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend.
- Bids – Check your bid amounts and bid strategies. The traffic coming in during this weekend is completely different than the traffic throughout the rest of the year. If you don’t make the appropriate changes you could lose a significant amount of sales. One of my previous clients had an extremely high conversion rate during this period. I switched from CPA bidding to a position-based bid strategy and saw 100%+ sales increase Black Friday weekend year over year. I would never have had this type of success if I hadn’t changed the bid strategies.
- Remarketing – Be as aggressive as you possibly can with your Remarketing efforts. Remarketing conversion rates will be even higher during the Black Friday weekend.
Alan Waggoner – Paid Search Marketing Manager
Philly Marketing Labs
Go for the bullseye by doubling down on what works. Your account is a wealth of information!
Do you still have campaigns bleeding money advertising with Search Partners enabled? Cut it out.
Well-structured websites should look into using DSAs (Dynamic Search Ads). Make sure to exclude your brand from search queries. To go for the bullseye, build-out DSA’s for the top categories of your website. This will make it easier to control budget on what you want to drive traffic for and (a little) less work on implementing negatives than a DSA campaign targeting All Pages would be.
If you have been running Shopping ads and want to build more text campaigns. Look at the search term data as a diving board for reliable keyword research. Which queries have a great ROAS? Which have an acceptable ROAS? and which have seen any sales? Always look for the 80/20 in your ad account. As a guide, you will find 80% of revenue is from 20% of search terms. In a lot of instances, you will see 95% of revenue is from 5% of search terms. Make sure you are maxing impression share for those terms.
If you have a compelling offer, make sure it’s in the ad copy and look to leverage all the great targeting Google has with in-market audiences for the products you sell as well as wider buckets with more seasonal specific targeting like “Black Friday Shoppers.”
Richard Callaghan – Paid Search & Display Strategist
Ferguson Enterprises
My Black Friday tip focuses on the preparation needed to capitalize on the rush of crowds. 12% of our total online revenue is generated during the period from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. But, even more importantly, over 60% of those shoppers are new to our website. This means we need to make sure we are capturing as much information as possible. Our priorities are as follows:
- Get the sale. If you get the sale you get their email.
- Get them to signup for promotional messaging.
- Get them to signup for our rewards program.
- Cookie them to build remarketing audiences.
We know that #2 and #3 are value multipliers. A rewards member purchases twice as much, twice as often, for twice as long. Margins are so slim during the holidays that we have to treat it as a customer acquisition campaign and build loyalty for the long term.
Vincent Ammirato – Marketing Systems Architect
Rack Room and Off Broadway Shoes
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.
