k Friday 2023: How to dominate Google Ads

Black Friday is an important day in PPC. Normaly, we launch new campaigns, and then carefully shape them to perfection, so that we can reap their rewards for many months, if no years.

Google Ads Black Friday is different. You only have a short amount of time to get the most from your efforts. You can ruin your results by using the wrong ad or bid.

The tips listed below will maximize your potential, no matter what your strategy is. We will cover how to adjust your budget and bids, as well as ad extensions and text, display ads and remarketing, keyword strategy and Shopping campaigns.

Quick Note: When I say Black Friday, I mean the entire Black Friday Weekend. Others treat Black Friday as a 5-day sale that starts on Thanksgiving and ends with Cyber Monday.

Table of Contents

Prepare your Google Ads campaign for Black Friday

It’s important to know what you will be doing to prepare for Black Friday. ecommerce is a good place to start, but as I continue with the rest of these tips, defining the promotions you will run makes a lot more sense.

Find out what you can about the following:

If you do not have many products, you may want to consider bidding less aggressively or promoting the product through Shopping or Search.

You should always have a back-up offer for generic keywords if you are not certain that you will have enough stock to run a particular promotion.

Find more holiday advertising tips right here!

Last year’s performance

Since I have already written a lot about how to get more success with PPC when seasonal swings occur, I will not spend too much time looking at historical performance.

It’s important to not pretend that this year is just one event. There are still several things you can learn based on past performance, despite the fact that PPC is changing. These include:

So on. You can learn from last year’s mistakes and get more from this year.

Define your rules for engagement

Before we dive into the details, I’d like to mention one last non-PPC issue.

You’re probably not the boss. Even if you are the boss, you should prepare for this section in advance.

Consider this scenario: you’re planning to spend $5,000 during Black Friday, and your goal is an 800% ROI.

Black Friday arrives and you spend the $5,000 by 1 pm, resulting in a return of 1,100%. What are you going to do?

All PPC managers shout: INCREASE YOUR BUDGET. How much should I increase my budget? What can your business afford? What is the remaining stock? What if ROAS were 700%? Do you need to increase your budget? Do you have an alternative promotion in place if you do not have any stock?

Setting your rules for the day is a powerful tool. If you think that you can handle the dream scenario, what if your website loads slowly due to high traffic and your boss has to pick his sick child up from school on the same day?

You can’t find out the answer to your question until it is too late.

Rules for Engagement can save you from a lot of headaches and help you get the most of your sale weekend.

Google Ads Black Friday Budgeting and Bidding Tips

The bidding process is one of those areas that can be difficult to master. It’s not necessarily Black Friday, but the days afterward. Due to the massive amount of data, if you use automated bidding you will have to manually run bids for at least 1 to 2 weeks after Black Friday.

I’ve never found a system that allows me to tell it not to use data from a certain time period when running its algorithms. This is a problem, because you will convert better on Black Friday compared to the weeks following. This could be a major issue depending on your industry.

To resolve this problem, I usually do the following:

You can download your bids up to a week before Black Friday

If you are running automated bids in Google then remove the bids, and check the Google Ads interface for the actual bids. You should be aware of a few things.

You might receive a different bid depending on when and what day you download them. Google’s ROAS and CPA bids, for example, are dynamically adjusted based on the day of week and time of day.

It’s possible that you won’t get the bid you want to reinstate, but this is the best you can do. You’re better off restoring a bid from the past that was 20-30% cheaper than continuing to run the Black Friday bids.

Budget your money wisely

You will have to raise your budget a lot on Black Friday.

Searches for smartphones, for example, have increased 10X.

Searches for toys have increased by 50%.

Black Friday Ad Writing Tips

Ads for Black Friday are similar to ads you write for all year long. Use ads that are relevant to your sale, and make sure you have enough space. This will help users become aware of what promotion you are running.

Black Friday is a day that you should not ignore.

The tactics are divided into Mandatory, and recommended. You can follow only the mandatory tactics if you are new to Black Friday or this is your very first Black Friday. If you have been in the game for a while, you should invest some extra time into the Recommended strategies.

All:

Recommended for Intermediates:

How to create Google Ads promotional assets

is a great promotion asset that you should use in your future ad strategy. Black Friday ads are no different.

Here are some examples of promotional assets:

It can help you stand out from the competition by adding an extra line to your ad. It’s just icing on top that the Black Friday deal is highlighted.

You should also limit your promotion’s run time to a certain period of time. This could be Friday through Sunday for Black Friday.

Your ad will have more space, and your offer will be given a greater sense of urgency.

Remember that not all ads will show. You can’t rely solely on the promotional asset to promote your promotion.

Advertise Black Friday in your ads

Referencing current events such as Black Friday is one of the best ways of ensuring your ads are relevant.

Keep it simple. For example:

You can easily change the second headline of all your ads into text that refers to your Black Friday deal. Google Ads makes it easy to do this.

To get a better CTR and better ROI, I recommend taking the time to create more specific ads for your most important categories and products.

Black Friday is an extremely busy day. Even if you only use the ads for one day, any time spent on writing better ads is worth it.

Change your sitelinks for specific products that are in high demand [recommended]

When writing ads, sitelinks are not usually the main focus. Most advertisers spend a few minutes adding a few random sitelinks.

It might be worth adding a little extra finesse to the sitelinks you use on Black Friday. Include the products that you promote in your sitelinks.

Let’s say that you run a campaign to promote Bluetooth speakers. You might normally have links like this:

Consider adding more specific sitelinks to your Black Friday offers:

It is important to go a little wider than usual because you’re more likely to persuade consumers to purchase something that they didn’t intend to.

We will often start looking for deals on various products. Even if someone searches specifically for Bluetooth speakers, they may be interested in other speakers or headphones if a great deal is available.

Add Inventory References [recommended]

Imagine you created a killer promotional campaign for Bose speakers. The product is in the middle, right between being a highly sought-after item at the right price and with an outstanding promotion.

Start selling and you’ll see it sells out before noon. Boom!

But You could have taken this advantage in your ads. You can make the products seem even more scarce by indicating how few are left.

Make sure to have backup promotional materials in case you run out of your product.

Label your ads “evergreen”

PPC is always a challenge. You are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency. In eCommerce, the workload can increase significantly at certain times of the year.

Black Friday is the day.

You should add the Evergreen label to all your ads before you begin the Black Friday campaign.

You can then easily pause and restart the ads when the sale has ended.

You should also label your Black Friday ads with the letters BF. Adding the year is also a good idea. For 2023, the tag would be BF-2023. So you won’t accidentally activate ads from last year next year.

You should write your ads a minimum of a week before the event.

Google Ads sends you those annoying emails about your ads being paused and not approved?

Black Friday is a good example of the reason for all this madness.

You can ensure that your ads are approved or rejected well before you need them to run by preparing your ads and uploading them in advance to your Google Ads Account.

You’re making a mistake if you write or upload your ads on the day that you actually need them. You will lose time.

You can use an automatic rule to activate and pause ads

You should construct the rule exactly as follows:

In case you need to, I suggest checking your ads and the results of the live search. Although I am a fan of automation, these things have gone wrong for the most stupid reasons.

You can live without ads for a few days or even half a week, but you cannot afford to miss out on an hour on Black Friday.

Black Friday Google Shopping Returns: How to Maximize Your Black Friday Google Shopping Returns

Black Friday shopping campaigns can be tricky. Although you have less control over your Shopping campaigns than with regular Search campaigns in Google Ads, this is still a crucial part of the campaign.

Create a new shopping campaign

You can approach Google Shopping campaigns in a few different ways, but I prefer the following method:

It is easy to let individual products slip through your Shopping campaign depending on the number of products you have.

You can keep track of the products that you expect to perform well on Black Friday by creating a new campaign.

Remember that if your Shopping campaign is segmented based on search queries, you should use the same tactic for this campaign. If you suddenly change your strategy for key products, your ROI can be affected.

Shoppers can now add storewide discounts to their new shopping campaign

Okay. You have a store-wide promotion with 20%. I get it.

This does not mean that your products are all equally important. You will find that if you review your last 60-day sales, there are 10, 20, 50 items that outsell all the others.

Add them to your new shopping campaign.

Prepare your shopping feed for Black Saturday

Here is where you will need to make your decision. You have to decide whether you want to run a promotion requiring a coupon code, as listed above, or lower the price in your feed so that it is reflected in ads.

This decision is often made for you by your business strategy (coupons or no coupons) or the limitations of your platform.

It is important that you create promotions in the Merchant Center if you are running with a coupon code. If you don’t, the price of your Google Shopping ads won’t reflect your actual price. This will decrease your CTR.

Feeds must reflect lower prices

Your feed must contain the exact same price for each product as your website. Two reasons:

  1. Your ads will display your original price if your price in your feed is not lower. This will seriously hurt your chances of success on Black Friday.
  2. Google is likely to catch your price discrepancy, and will disapprove of your product.

It could take up to 4-6 hours from the moment you notice the error until the product is approved by Google. You can’t afford this time to be wasted. If you’re lucky, you might even catch it!

I recommend regenerating/updating your feed and sending it to the Merchant Center right after you update the prices on your website. It could be at midnight or the day before. You should update your feed as soon as the prices of your website change.

It is important to do this as stock levels fluctuate throughout the day.



Source

Black Friday is a great time to update your feed.

You set up your feed to update once every 24 hours. Most often at night.

It is highly recommended that you update your Black Friday page more often. Particularly as stock levels change or promotions are changed.

Black Friday Tips for Remarketing

The majority of ecommerce sites use Dynamic remarketing. However, sending generic messages on Black Friday will not cut through the digital noise.

I recommend creating a brand new audience exclusively for Black Friday. You’ll be creating a new audience on the day before Black Friday, which will exclude previous visitors.

You can then set an aggressive bid to target people who have visited your website on Black Friday, and another bid to target people who visited before Black Friday.

Remarketing bids should be reduced after Black Friday

Reduce your remarketing activities in the days following Black Friday. The majority of users have already bought the items they wanted or simply weren’t interested.

Remarketing with static images

I’d highly recommend using static images as part of your remarketing campaign on Black Friday. You’ll probably see something similar in your dynamic display remarketing ads.

This works well in most cases. On Black Friday, you will want something that stands out and sends a message that accurately reflects the scarcity.

It’s easy to win if you have some banners made in the most common sizes. You shouldn’t spend much money if you find a designer on a website like Upwork. You can get a designer to work on your designs for pizza if you have one in-house.

When you do this, the only thing that I would add to complicate matters is to segment your retargeting. If a user clicks on the speakers section, you will show them a Black Friday display advertisement that includes your speaker promotion.

You can use a generic, general banner. But it will be more effective to create ads that are better targeted.

If your store exceeds a certain size, this may be impossible in practice. You have to limit your hands-on efficiency when you are working at scale to reach as many people possible.

Black Friday Google Ads keyword strategy tips

You keywords will largely remain the same on Black Friday.

It is highly recommended that you add or reactivate keywords for products for which you are running promotions. Black Friday will see a higher conversion rate for your entire keyword portfolio than the rest of the calendar year. This means that you can afford reactivating those keywords which you had paused because of low performance.

It is also true that the opposite is true. You may want to consider pausing certain parts of your Google Ads Account that are not being promoted.

Here is an example of how a term’s search volume increased by a significant amount compared to the same date a week prior to Black Friday.

Your standard pricing is unlikely to be enough to encourage consumers to purchase from you. This is because of the increased volume, and also the fact that competitors are running promotions.

Advertise “Black friday + My Keyword”

Yes, definitely.

If you want to control search results, add black Friday after some of your keywords.

It will not, however, make or break your business. You want to have more control in large markets. Say you sell Bose Speakers. You show up well for searches for Bose Speakers but you are in position six when it comes to Bose Speakers Black Friday Deal.

If your market is large enough, adding black Friday as a keyword can be a great tactic.

Do not advertise the keyword “black Friday“.

You can’t target it effectively if you have a too wide range.

You can create an exception by creating a campaign that only targets your remarketing list which contains the term Black Friday. Find your largest list. You can say, “Anyone who has visited your website in the past 6 months.” Anybody who has ever bought anything from you. Add them all to a remarketing campaign for search ads using the targetting setting:

This will show you an advertisement to anyone who visits your website and searches for Black Friday sales.

We can assume they are interested in your products, even if they don’t express it. (Remember – brand loyalty dramatically increases CTR.

Prepare for Black Friday with these scenarios

Google Ads Black Friday: Here’s what you need to know.

Scenario 1: Low average position of key products

Review your early statistics when it comes to Black Friday’s average position. Consider increasing your bids if you are coming in low on some of your most important products.

You can increase or decrease your keyword position as normal throughout the day, but make sure that it is in a good place.

Position should be between 2-3 average positions. The ROAS will determine how high you want to rank. However, the higher your position, the more CTR and ad extensions you get.

Scenario 2: No sales for key products

It’s important to admit to yourself that you have been beaten. You may not be able to attribute it to your Google Ads campaign.

Is your competitor running a better deal than you?

You might want to copy their promotion, or you could cut your losses. Under normal circumstances, it’s very difficult to compete with a competitor who is significantly cheaper than you.

It’s nearly impossible to find a good deal on Black Friday when zombie-like shoppers are chasing the deals like that kid in Walking Dead.

Consider remarketing if you are not seeing any results from your Black Friday campaigns. You’ll then only be able to show your ads on people who have visited your website before. This strategy relies on the fact these consumers already know you, and has proven that this will have a significant impact on your conversions.

Scenario 3: Budget maxed-out

Check your budget regularly. Check to make sure you are not at or near your maximum budget. Consider adding budget to your existing budget, based on the rules of engagement you have established.

What do you do after Black Friday?

Once Black Friday is over, make sure to do the following with your PPC account:

Be sure to ignore these days when you evaluate your performance after Black Friday. The days following Black Friday are often a period of loss for many advertisers.

Black Friday Ads in Google is…

You’re not to blame if this was too much for you. This was a little bit of a mental dump.

You can download or print a checklist of this article. Here is a simplified Black Thursday checklist.

Below I have summarized some of the best Black Friday PPC strategies.

For Bids

Advertisements:

Shop Online

Remarketing

Keywords

It’s important to set yourself up well for Black Friday. You can’t be in maintenance mode .

Changes to your account can be made by getting out of your comfort zones.

Want more Black Friday Tips? Learn how to get the best results out of your Facebook Black Friday ads.

The article Ultimate guide to dominating Google Ads for Black Friday 2023 first appeared on WordStream.

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