~ Ben
It may be hard to believe (and a little scary), but Thanksgiving is next week and Black Friday is only 8 days away! (Momentary pause while the shock settles in) With this daunting thought in mind, there are two things to consider that should make the holiday shopping weekend go as smoothly (and hopefully as profitably for clients) as possible -- holiday promotion ads and a Black Friday placement pack.
- When it comes to the holiday season, one of the clearest trends we have picked up on is that ads with promotions perform better than ads that don’t (seems that consumers like deals. Strange, I know). If clients have any upcoming promotions (free shipping, a percent off, sales, etc.), all ads should be promoting these. This is especially true if they have Black Friday specific sales. If this is the case, make a point of saying “Black Friday Sale” or indicate that this is a limited time only (“Fri – Sun”, “This Weekend Only”, etc.).
If you plan on creating and implementing ads specifically for Black Friday and the shopping weekend after Thanksgiving, be sure to implement them in the account by the end of day Tuesday (11/23) to give them enough time to make it through the ad approval process. - Some of your clients may want to do a bit more than just create new ads for next week. If you have a client that would like to target users actively looking for Black Friday deals, then you may want to create a display campaign targeting sites that aggregate such deals. Using the Placement Tool in your AdWords account, search for words such as ‘black friday’ and ‘black friday sales’ to identify sites that would be good to target. With this list, there are two possible ways to use it:
For either of these, set it to run starting this Friday (11/19) through EOD Sunday (11/28). If clients have deals carrying through cyber Monday, then extend it another day.
- Create a campaign to target only managed placements and have a single ad group that contains all of these placements.
- Create a campaign with the same settings, but have multiple ad groups with keyword themes and set them to target these placements, creating an Enhanced Online Campaign. For example, if you have a cosmetics client, you might want to have a few ad groups with themes like “makeup”, “hair products”, “ cosmetics”, etc. Then, targeting these Black Friday placements, you will be in a better position to place ads in front of consumers looking for deals around products your client sells.
As always, with all of your clients, make sure that your budgets and bids are adjusted for this busy weekend. With the increase in traffic, budgets can get depleted more quickly (resulting in campaigns stopping ads from being shown) and competitors bid more aggressively. Make sure that budgets are set to keep campaigns running throughout the day and increase bids to maintain positions.
These can be stressful times in the online advertising world, but if you plan ahead by implementing things early and position your clients in front of customers looking for deals around their products, you can help to make this a great season!
