Originating in America, Black Friday happens on the Friday after Thanksgiving as an unofficial holiday when stores slash their prices and shoppers storm through the doors ready to fill their arms with heavily discounted items. Although this still happens in the high street, Black Friday has become the biggest date on the eCommerce calendar for online retailers and businesses.
Users flood to sites instead of stores, armed with discount codes or early-access emails, ready to fill their baskets and check out with products at bargain prices.
But over the years, as Black Friday has become a lucrative opportunity for eCommerce sites, it has also become a highly competitive event. That’s why an effective marketing campaign is crucial to capture users even before Black Friday begins and to make sure your business stands out from the crowd.
Here are our tips for planning and building a Black Friday PPC Campaign.
1. Start Planning Now
Summer might have just ended, but now is the time to start planning and organising your Black Friday Campaign. This includes confirming what products you will include in your Black Friday Sale, what discount you will offer to users and also how long you will run the campaign for.
Keep in mind that most online retailers will launch their Black Friday Campaigns weeks before the actual sale and will continue their Black Friday offers for 1-2 weeks after Black Friday has ended.
2. Get Your Website Ready
Failure to get your website ready for the surge in Black Friday traffic could cost you in crucial sales. Ensuring your users have a smooth experience from landing on your page, to the checkout process should be a priority when you start planning for your Black Friday promotions.
Firstly, prepare the deals on your website and implement these into your promotional designs. It might seem obvious, but make it clear to your users that you are offering a Black Friday promotion!
Secondly, rigorously test your website to make sure it can handle the surge in traffic when you officially launch. There’s no point driving traffic to a site that keeps crashing. Make sure you test each element of your site, just like a customer’s journey. This will help you highlight any weak areas or hidden glitches that might cause issues during your Black Friday sale.
3. Get Creative With Your Ads
Black Friday offers you an opportunity to try something new and out-of-the-box with your PPC ads. With your Search Ads, you can experiment with engaging copy that promotes your Black Friday offer in a way that gets users to click on your ads. Remember, your ads won’t just be engaging because you are offering a discount, you need to give users more of a reason to click on your Black Friday ad, rather than your competitor’s.
Don’t forget Display Ads! These types of ads are a highly effective way of targeting users who have visited your site in the past with your new Black Friday offer. Experiment with GIFs in Standard Display campaigns, or test different creative with Responsive Search Ads.
4. Shoppers Are Getting Smart - Don’t Forget To Re-Target Them
In the weeks leading up to Black Friday, some users will typically hold back from purchasing and wait for the discounts. Some of the highly organised users will browse sites and make a mental (or physical) list of what they want to add to their basket once Black Friday hits.
These are users that you want to be re-targeting to keep your brand and products in their mind. Then you can re-target them through your highly creative Display or Video ads so you don’t leave those users behind for when Black Friday arrives.
5. Don’t Forget Your Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are an underrated element of Google Ads, but proven to be highly effective. You can schedule a Promotional Extension to populate on your ads that shows the discount users can expect before they click on your ad. Even better, Google Ads even has Black Friday as a saved Occasion within the Promotional Extensions tab!
6. Keep Your Marketing Cohesive
Odds are you are not only running PPC ads to promote your Black Friday campaign. You may also have email marketing, organic or paid social media ads and also the creative changes to your website.
It’s important that if you are running multiple campaigns across different platforms that you keep the messaging, promotions and creative consistent. Your users might see a handful of your ads from different platforms and inconsistent ads can cause your overall Black Friday campaign to become disjointed.
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