Prepping Your Paid Search Campaigns Ready for Black Friday

Prepping Your Paid Search Campaigns Ready for Black Friday

Are you and your Paid Search Campaigns ready for Black Friday? No? Don’t despair! We’ve included our 5 top tips to prepare your campaigns for the Black Friday period…

Like it or not, Black Friday is now firmly established as part of the British retail calendar, having found its way across the Atlantic over recent years. It has merged with Cyber Monday, which also began in the US, to form a long weekend of discounts that see shoppers go crazy for the latest deals. However, concerns over mediocre high street sales and poor fulfilment of online orders show that there are some lessons to be learned for this year.

While high streets were quiet in the early hours of last year’s Black Friday, websites were overloaded as people ordered from their favourite online brands. Shoppers spent £1.1bn online on Black Friday, 36% more than 2015 according to Experian-IMRG.

What can you do to ensure your PPC campaigns are ready?

Owning the Ad Space for Your Best Sellers

Owning the Ad space is about taking up as much screen space in the search engine results page as possible so that people are more likely to click your ad than they are a competitor

• Assess which are your hero products that are going to drive you the most sales this Christmas. Look at current impression share and average position. Are you hitting 99-100% impression share at an average position 1? While this is unlikely (as throughout the year, it may be prove to be less profitable in terms of ROI), you should make the most of Black Friday sales by allowing for extra budget to push for those top positions.
• It doesn’t just have to be your best sellers – by heavily promoting your high Life Time Value products (the ones people keep coming back for) you can gain new valuable customers
• Maximise use of ad extensions including: Site links, reviews, structured snippets, call outs and seller ratings.
• Pull your best sellers into their own shopping campaign and prioritise them as high. Make sure you bid at a product level & add negative keywords to maximise your budget

Remarketing

Remarketing is about targeting previous visitors to your website. You can create audience types (a way of grouping visitors based on how they behaved on your website on previous visits.) Example audiences may be Converters, Basket Abandoners, Non-purchasers etc.

• Make sure your remarketing banners reflect the Black Friday messaging and include count downs for the last few hours of the discount to really push a sense of urgency
• Display (GDN) remarketing for your best selling lines can also work well over the Black Friday period. Ensure your banners have really strong messaging and a call to action
• Consider dynamic remarketing to capture those people that abandoned basket but are more likely to convert with a Black Friday discount

Don’t Just Stick to Traditional Paid Search Channels

Most people think of paid search as Adwords and Bing. But there are also social platforms that offer pay per click advertising which are worth considering:

• Consider Pinterest promoted pins for example. The life of a pin can be several months, so from the initial small promotion cost, the ROI from that pin will keep on increasing organically until way after Christmas.
• Instagram & Facebook promotions can be really strong but consider carefully if these are right for your brand and customer demographic

Synergy

Marketing messages work best when they sync up – it maximises the impact.

• Make sure your keyword, ad copy and landing pages all match up. Keep those bounce rates low by delivering potential customers what they are expecting – don’t make them think!
• Is your ad copy all about you? Or is it about what the customer is looking for? Heavily branded messaging (unless you are Nike or Coca Cola) does not offer a good customer experience and will not deliver a good click through rate.

Mobile

Mobile is still often second place to traditional websites and digital marketing in many business owners minds. This should not be the case:

• There’s a reason Google is hammering home the message about mobile optimised websites. The growth in mobile shopping has been phenomenal & we are now seeing the largest majority of our clients sales coming via mobile devices. If your website’s mobile experience isn’t up to scratch you are losing sales. Adwords will also show your ads less often reducing your visibility in the market place.

We hope you found these tips useful and can put them in to practice ready to make an impact and stand out from the crowd on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

If you’re worried your accounts aren’t where you’d like them to be, why not get in touch with one of our PPC Team to see how we may be able to assist? chat@infinitynation.com