Insights
Head of Paid Media
PPC
Black Friday is a busy annual tradition for consumers and businesses. It signifies the beginning of the holiday season, with everyone thinking about gift-giving and family gatherings. For many sectors, transactions during Black Friday outperform the rest of the winter sales period.
Due to the short-lived, fast-paced nature of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, having a robust digital marketing strategy with a strong focus on paid media is crucial for improving annual profit and grabbing a significant share of sales.
To ensure your business takes full advantage of these opportunities, we’ll share nine digital marketing tips that will assist you in finalizing your paid media strategy for Black Friday.
Black Friday is the perfect opportunity for consumers to buy products for themselves, their friends, and their family. However, due to the incredibly broad demographic participating in the annual event, your team may need help identifying which products should be front and center of your campaigns. To help your team plan, Amazon reviewed their Black Friday sales from last year and listed the most popular purchase categories:
– Home
– Fashion
– Toys
– Beauty
– Technology products
– Electronic devices
By exploring industry trends during Black Friday, you can highlight products that attract consumers and invest your budget into advertising items with proven historical value.
After you decide which products to focus your marketing efforts on, your team needs to explore the effectiveness of different ad platforms to set your strategy up for success.
Although you can continue to use the channels you are most familiar with, reviewing your Black Friday data from the previous year can help reinvigorate your approach. This review gives you an understanding of which PPC and Programmatic channels perform strongest, enabling you to maximize sales potential.
Testing before Black Friday minimizes potential problems and ensures a smoother operation. Experimenting with different text and CTAs to identify which ad copy improves performance, as well as checking your shopping feed and ensuring tracking is set up, eliminates unnecessary setbacks.
You must spend money to make money, and when it comes to Black Friday, the more you spend, the more you will make. Increasing or uncapping your budget, when backed by testing and data, allows you to capture as many sales as possible. Adspert notes that Amazon recommends increasing Ad bids between 10-30% during Black Friday to increase chances of getting the most sales.
If you need help finding an available digital advertising budget, consider using Google’s shared budgets. Google’s shared budget automatically allocates a budget across your holiday campaigns, depending on performance. So, higher-performing campaigns get priority over lower-performing ones.
Consumers do not behave the same way during Black Friday as they do the rest of the year. Because of this, you cannot effectively predict customer behavior, making planning digital advertising difficult. Manually adjusting PPC bids in real-time is especially problematic. To interpret sudden changes in behavior more efficiently while minimizing human error, Google introduced seasonality adjustments for smart bidding.
Now, you can apply your predicted conversion rate for the Black Friday period using data from previous years, and Google will consider these adjustments during the selected date range. Other smart-bidding strategies can also improve your campaign performance, depending on your objective.
For example, Maximise Conversion Value bidding helps you achieve the most valuable conversions with your available budget. Target ROAS bidding allows you to drive additional revenue at your target return on ad spend.
Many people use Black Friday sales to buy products they would not usually purchase, including one-off, big purchases. Broadening the target audience for your digital advertising widens your reach and ensures paid media advertisements are in front of these hard-to-predict shoppers. An easy way to expand your reach is to increase your lookalike audience pool percentage during the promotion.
For your PPC campaigns, consider using Dynamic Search Ads to capture search queries not in your keyword list automatically. This approach will ensure you are still purchasing ads for new and relevant search queries you may not have on your radar. Another reason to expand targeting is because purchase intent is higher throughout Black Friday. The Black Friday period reduces barriers for users who may not have purchased from your store previously because of hesitation over quality or price.
Shopping ads are more visual and information-rich than text ads and attract users with higher purchase intent. Running shopping campaign ads for your promotional items helps drive more clicks and conversions. Performance Max campaigns with Smart bidding to improve Black Friday sales as much as possible.
You will likely be battling multiple competitors during Black Friday. So, you must ensure your creative is distinctive to make your brand stand out. Using fonts, colors, and words recognizable to your brand will help determine if a user clicks on your ad over another.
Creating an Amazon brand store provides a more significant opportunity to highlight your products, drive traffic, and improve sales throughout Black Friday. Each marketplace store has a unique URL linked to every product, so customers can easily browse your offerings.
Having a brand store also means you can run sponsored brand ads to target specific keywords at the top of users’ searches. Amazon recommends running all three types of ads (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Product Display Ads) during Black Friday.
Due to the competitive nature of Black Friday, effectively planning your PPC campaigns is crucial for cutting through the noise. For each product or category you want to run ads for, you need to know the following:
You must also stay aware of inventory levels to ensure you stop promoting products that sell out quickly.
In addition to planning your paid media ads, you must devise contingency plans.
Ensuring everyone knows what to do prevents time-consuming, last-minute issues.
Top-level decision processes need a clear outline leading up to the holiday. Those working on the account may need to make snappy decisions outside of usual working hours. Having clearly defined rules, such as increasing the budget by an agreed-on amount if ROAS is over a certain percentage, will keep campaigns running smoothly.
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Insights
Insights
Insights