Don’t get caught out by the quickly approaching Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or as it’s more commonly known ‘Black FiveDay’. Follow these 5 quick and simple ways to prepare your search network text ads for Black Friday on Friday 24th November, to Cyber Monday on Monday 29th November.
1. Specific Text Ad Copy
In 2016 House of Fraser upped their Black Friday marketing strategy, changing their H1 to include ‘Black Friday Deals’ and running them alongside a dedicated landing page.
You can take similar action by creating relevant ad-copy specifically for the Black FiveDay period. Variations of ‘deals’, ‘savings’, ‘offers’ and ‘bargains’ as well as the obligatory ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ keywords will likely appeal to those on the lookout for a decent deal. Use Google’s Keyword Planner to see what kind of keywords you should be looking at targeting for your specific industry. Just make sure that you schedule these ads to only run during the sales period, with your normal ads resuming straight afterwards.
2. Explore Device Bid Optimisation
Black FiveDay 2016 saw smartphones converting at 5% and tablets at 6%, and with the ever-growing presence of mobile and tablets, we’re likely to see impressive figures again this year. Therefore, it is vital that retailers consider the devices their customers are using, and accommodate their bid strategy accordingly. Essentially you want to spend more money on the clicks that are most likely to convert, and judging this by device type is a useful method.
Look into your own analytics to see what devices your current customers are using to visit the site, which device your customers are mainly converting through, and which has the highest average transaction value, to give yourself an indication of which devices are most effective for conversion. You can then increase your bid adjustments appropriately.
3. Black FiveDay Site Link Extension
If you are going to have a number of products on offer, you should consider adding them to a designated product listing page, which can then be used as the landing page for all your Black FiveDay communications. This is good practice as it means that potential customers are taken to the most suitable page immediately, with the products on the page all being of Black Friday relevance. You can then also use the page as the final URL for a Black FiveDay specific site link extension, which will only show during the Black FiveDay period, as demonstrated below.
By adding this site link extension to all relevant ad groups across your account, you will be able to sit back and relax, knowing that when it comes to having some Black FiveDay presence in your text ads, you’re all covered.
4. Consider Your Black FiveDay Budget
The busiest online sales period of the year is coming, which means higher competition for paid search, and higher average cost per clicks across the PPC board. With this in mind, you will need to reconsider your budget if you are going to retain competitive advantage during Black FiveDay.
If possible, look to get an increase in budget during the Black FiveDay period, with any additional funds being put towards your sales campaigns. If additional funding is not possible, how about reducing your account spend slightly over the upcoming week,s and then allocating that pot of money to the Black FiveDay campaigns? Whichever strategy you choose, just be sure to change the budget back to your original schedule after Cyber Monday to resume normal spending.
5. Callout Extensions
Regardless of your participation in Black Friday, it’s time to make sure that your callout extensions promote your delivery and refund details. With more and more online retailers offering next day delivery, click and collect and free refund services, you need to make sure that you are shouting out about what you can offer potential customers. It could make the difference between an individual hitting the busy Black Friday high street for their purchase and them buying from your website.
Similarly, if you have a physical store then use your callout extensions to let potential customers know crucial details like opening times and addresses. 70% of physical shoppers start their purchasing journey with Google, so help them on their way with your text ad’s callouts. For Black FiveDay this may include extended opening hours or in-store online deals, set to only appear during the specific time frame applicable.
Conclusion
At the end of the Black FiveDay period, make sure you evaluate your performance and look for strengths and weaknesses that you could work on the following year. You may also come across some interesting trends and behaviours which could help you implement a similar strategy for other major sales events such as Boxing Day.
To see how a great strategy can make a difference to your Black FiveDay performance read our case study.
Now to start preparing for the Christmas sale period…
