The period of Black Friday & Cyber Monday has been significantly heightened over the past two years due to the global pandemic which has caused an increased digital presence and adoption among retailers.
It will therefore be interesting to see how Black Friday & Cyber Monday will pan out in 2022, and it’s crucial to ensure your business is Paid Search ready. To help make sure your business is fully equipped, we’ve created a checklist to help you get prepared for this promotional season.
1. Attribution models & referrals
Our first top tip to be fully prepared for the Black Friday season is to ensure you’re utilising the most relevant attribution model within your PPC account. As demand heightens closer to the Black Friday period your account may become eligible to use the ‘Data-Driven’ attribution model. Data-driven attribution uses your conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each ad interaction across the conversion path” [Google, 2022] - it’s therefore best practice to ensure this attribution model is being used to correctly to identify the impact the PPC campaigns have on your overall performance.
Another setting to check before the promotional season is your referral traffic within Google Analytics. “Referral traffic is the segment of traffic that arrives on your website through another source, like through a link on another domain” [Google, 2022]. With many eCommerce sites now offering alternative payment methods such as PayPal, Klarna, Finance Gateways etc it’s crucial to ensure that these payment gateways are added as exclusions to ensure that conversions are tracked correctly and are allocated to the correct marketing channel.
2. Merchant promotions feed
To highlight and showcase specific offers within the Shopping Network you can use Merchant Promotions to “distribute online offers across different Google properties, including Google Search, the Shopping tab, Chrome and more. When you add promotions to products that you sell on Google, shoppers see a 'special offer' link (e.g. 15% off, free delivery)” [Google, 2022]. The promotions feed must be set up in advance of this period as it can take a few days for Google to accept your enrolment onto Merchant Promotions.
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3. Budgets & scripts
The level of traffic and therefore advertising spending will naturally increase before and during the Black Friday season, therefore it’s crucial to ensure campaigns have a sufficient budget allocation to allow for demand increases. A key recommendation would be to ensure you’re utilising a ‘Budget Checker’ script within the account which will automatically send an email to your email address when a percentage of spending you indicate, for example, 70%, has been reached. This then indicates your campaigns are close to their daily budget cap and therefore increasing them may be beneficial. The script can be found here.
4. Audiences
In the same way, you would for any campaign it’s important to ensure the right audiences have been selected so you’re reaching the right people. Regardless of whether your audiences are set to Targeting or Observation, including all relevant audiences will help with reporting purposes. You should first ensure standard audiences such as past customers and those already aware of your brand are being targeted through remarketing lists and customer match. You can then scale this up to target similar audiences and third-party audiences such as the ‘Adwords Optimised List’, once this has been done you can then achieve greater scale with the use of in-market and affinity audiences. A few recommendations would be to ensure the following audiences have been applied to all campaigns; Black Friday Shopping, Christmas Shopping and Shoppers.
5. Ad content & automated rules
It’s crucial to have your Black Friday promotions confirmed in advance for the correct strategy to be planned and for relevant ad content to be created and scheduled. We would recommend creating dedicated Black Friday Responsive Search Ads and when these ads go live to pause your original BAU ads. To further promote your offers you can also set up dedicated promotion extensions “which show below your ad in an easy-to-read format to catch the eye of potential customers” [Google, 2022]. To ensure Black Friday runs smoothly we’d recommend setting up automated rules to automatically pause/enable your relevant ads at set times - an easier method to do this is through tagging your ads with labels.
6. Remove out of stock products
Our final recommendation would be to ensure any products that are ‘out of stock’ are removed from the Shopping feed. Over the busy period products are more likely to go ‘out of stock’ much quicker and if these are still promoted within the Shopping feed this could impact cost, reduce customer satisfaction and hinder account optimisation. Ensuring ‘out of stock’ products are not included in the feed will reduce any potentially wasted spending.
Your Paid Search account must be optimised and ready for Q4 in line with Google’s best practices in good time to ensure the account has enough time to learn from any changes you may have made in line with Google’s algorithm. We hope this article has helped to provide you with a checklist to be best prepared for this promotional season.
