Black Friday has been adopted by Canadians as the busiest shopping day of the season, replacing the once ever popular Boxing Day Events. Historically, in the US., Black Friday is the Friday after the American Thanksgiving, and it signifies the beginning of the Holiday Shopping Season. American Thanksgiving is always the last Thursday of November, this week, which means the flood gates for holiday shopping have opened!
The majority of our Customers here at DMX have come to realize the importance of optimizing their online marketing campaigns for Black Friday. In order to assist with educating our Canadian Businesses we asked our Account Strategist at Google, Dean Feole, to give us some tips to optimize our Black Friday Campaigns. This is what Dean recommends:
1. Make Sure You Have Enough Budget: There is a 60% increase in total holiday traffic. Raise budget caps to meet the increasing demand. Check your data reports to identify opportunities to increase budget where your CPAs are under average. I would also recommend you take a look at your historical peaks in traffic to help estimate your budgets.
2. Capitalize on Mobile Traffic: There was a 140% increase in mobile clicks on shopping last year and this year we are anticipating significant growth on top of that this year. You need to raise your mobile bid adjustments significantly during peak shopping season or you will be missing more than half of the holiday traffic.
3. Set the Right Bid for Every Auction Based on Your Conversion Rates: Use Google’s Smart Bid Strategies like Enhanced CPC to help optimize bids in real time. During Black Friday and Cyber Week searches will increase drastically and be a little erratic. Using a Smart Bid Strategy will allow you to take into account real time data that you will not be able to use manually or even with bidding platforms as data to those are delayed by a few hours.
4. Target Easy Wins: Existing customer have 30% higher transaction amounts and 40% more items purchased during the Holidays. Make sure you capture these users by adding an RLSA list to every ad group in your Search and Shopping campaigns. I recommend using the Bid only strategy with at least a 50% bid adjustment on your lists.
5. Capture Users Searching Locally: There was 2x increase in the amount of local searches last year. Make sure you have opted into Search Partners and included Location extensions (where possible) to show on Local Search Ads.
Black Friday is but one day in the year, but it happens to be the busiest shopping day, followed by Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), which is the busiest online shopping day. Being ready for this traffic is key to success of any marketing campaign. Worried that you missed your opportunity because it is too late already? Don’t be, there is still plenty of time in the Holiday Season to optimize your online campaigns to garner successful traffic. Are you confused by what all this means? We are always happy to help out! It is just a matter of your reaching out and contacting us! Wishing Everyone a Happy Holiday Shopping Season!
