Prepping your Paid Search Campaigns for Black Friday

There are 130 Days until Black Friday…

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.

The figures make for impressive reading – 2019 saw a 16.5% increase in Black Friday sales from the previous year, with Barclaycard alone reporting a 12.5% increase in transaction levels and an incredible 1,184 transactions per second recorded during peak periods.

What can you do to ensure your PPC campaigns are ready? Here are our 5 top tips to help you prepare your campaigns:

1. 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 proven 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.

2. 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. Now is the time to use this technique to build your audience in preparation for Black Friday.

•      Make sure your remarketing banners reflect the Black Friday messaging and includecount downs for the last few hours of the discount to really push a sense of urgency.

•      Display (GDN) remarketing for your bestselling 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.

3. Don’t Just Stick to Traditional Paid Search Channels

Most people think of paid search as Adwords and Microsoft Ads. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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 with UK shoppers increasingly using mobile devices for accessing retail sites. In Q4, just under three quarters (74.3%) of site visits were made through mobile devices, with just 25.7% made through desktops. 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 marketplace.

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 quite where you’d like them to be, why not get in touch? We’re offering complimentary 1:1 consultancy sessions with one of our experts – book your slot