Prepare your Black Friday PPC with these 3 tips

It’s almost like Black Friday happens every year, so we’re going to have to think about a Black Friday PPC strategy eventually. 

We’re here to share with you some of our top PPC tips to make sure that your account is a success through the Black Friday period.

1. Event specific ad copy

The first one, and it might seem a little bit obvious, is Black Friday specific ad copy.

We need to make sure that our ad copy has been pre-agreed and that it is relevant and appealing to the audience. Get to know your user so you can create ad copy that engages them. We can also use ad customisers to give that extra sense of urgency. Things like countdowns within the actual ad text itself can improve click through rates (CTR). You’re allowed to get creative and test things out. Have a fecking field day.

2. Utilise merchant center promotions

We definitely want to be looking at Google Merchant Centre. More specifically, in the first instance, promotions. 

Again, we need to make sure that the promotion has been pre-agreed and has been approved by Google Merchant Centre. From here, that promotion will show in the Google Shopping results and allow users to see the offer before they’ve clicked on the website. If your competitors aren’t doing this they’re missing out, and you could potentially improve your CTR as a result.

The promotion extension also works in a similar way in the Google Search campaigns, making sure you’ve covered all bases.

The main point though, is to be prepared for what’s going to happen over Black Friday. We do this by using real data. So, go back and look at your Google Ads and your Google Analytics from previous years. That way, you can assess how much of an uplift to expect.

3. Seasonality adjustments

We can now start using seasonality adjustments in the account to make adjustments to Black Friday PPC.

Most campaigns in the accounts will be using an automated bidding strategy. As Black Friday is for a limited time period, it’s not going to give us enough time for those bidding strategies to catch up. That’s where the seasonality adjustments come in, allowing us to put in a manual override for what we expect the conversion rate to be, therefore maximising the possible revenue.

Be sure that you’re using actual real tangible data in order to do this, so that:

1. We’re not leaving any revenue on the table. And
2. We’re not spending too much that it’s going to adversely affect your ROAS

And so ends our top PPC tips for Black Friday. There are plenty of other steps to take to overhaul your PPC all year round too, or you could always sign up for a forensic PPC audit to lay bare your PPC efforts and unmask any shortcomings.  

If you need any more help, get in touch with the PPC team at Dark Horse.