Black Friday Week is finally here! This year is sure to be a little bit different, and amidst the mayhem it’s easy to feel a bit overwhelmed.
So here are 5 things you can still do this week to drive incremental eCommerce sales through search, Google Shopping, and YouTube Ads.
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1. Seasonal Bid Adjustments
Although Smart Bidding can optimise towards seasonal events, seasonal bid adjustments are an additional layer you can use to drive maximum ROI.
This feature works by providing advertisers with an additional bid adjustment they can leverage, much in the same way of device or audience bid adjustments.
For example, if you have a flash sale coming up, and anticipate an increase in Conversion Rate as a result, you can use seasonal bid adjustments to apply a predicted Conversion Rate adjustment, and Smart Bidding will consider that adjustment for the date range selected, while trying to hit your target CPA.
This feature is also great for new product launches, when you anticipate a temporary surge in conversion performance across multiple campaigns.
2. Black Friday In-Market Users
Applying seasonal in-market audiences to your campaigns, such as Black Friday shoppers, can help to maximise visibility across top-of-funnel users who haven’t previously visited your website.
Google groups these users based on their recent search history and websites they’ve visited, so you can be assured that they are highly sensitive to attractive offers relevant to their interests.
For best results, use as part of a Combined Audience, perhaps merging with relevant affinity groups to form a super audience. For example, a high-end cosmetics brand may want to merge several audience layers, including luxury shopper affinity segments, in-market users for skincare, and in-market users for Black Friday shopping. The end result would be an audience that would likely outperform any single affinity or in-market audience overlay.
3. Google Merchant Promotions
Google Merchant Promotions are snippets of text that appear under your Shopping Ads, usually denoted by: special offer. These can have a significant impact on your clickthrough rates across Google Shopping, and at this time of year, those clicks are likely to be especially valuable as look to attract mid-funnel shoppers in comparison mode.
It’s worth reducing your Target ROAS by up to 15% at the start of the promotion, in order to drive as much initial visibility as possible. If implementing this feature at the start of Black Friday week, look to gradually scale up your Target ROAS thereafter.
4. Dynamic Search Ads & Combined Audiences
Dynamic Search Ads are the easiest way to target searches on Google. It’s an ideal solution for brands with large websites, and multiple product categories. Unlike regular search campaigns which target users with keywords, Dynamic Search Ads generate ads based on your website content, dynamically creating ad headlines in the process.
Using Dynamic Search Ads during Black Friday week is a great way of finding incremental traffic opportunities, even for eCommerce advertisers with elaborate account structures.
Use DSA across best-selling products, categories, and even blog content to bring qualified traffic to your online shop. For best results, use in conjunction with Combined Audiences to merge top affinity and in-market segments.
5. YouTube Sequential Ads
As well as standalone video ads, Google Ads now allows you to stitch together multiple videos to form a sequential series of video ads.
These work by serving specific ads to people based on what they’ve viewed, engaged with, and skipped within your sequence of video ads. You can use multiple video types, including skippable, unskippable, and bumper videos, to form a narrative around your brand that leaves a lasting impression.
During Black Friday week, you might want to create a three to four step sequence of video ads merging lifestyle, product, and offer creative.
Look to target those people that visited your website within the last 30 days, but didn’t purchase with relevant creative to encourage them to finally take action. For example, amongst product viewers, you may want to create a sequence which starts off with a brand lifestyle ad, then serves a relevant product ad, an ad that follows up with press coverage and blogger reviews, before finally closing the sequence with an offer-driven creative.
