5 Black Friday Tips for Google Search Campaigns

With only a few weeks left until the Black Friday weekend (25th November), now is the time to review, update and prepare your Google Ads for the biggest online shopping weekend of the year. The Black Friday weekend is full of high-purchase intent consumers looking for a good deal so you must ensure you’re targeting the correct audience with advanced PPC strategies that will drive lots of high-quality traffic to your site. Read on to discover our top 5 tips to ready your Google Ads campaigns.

1. Don’t Wait Until Black Friday Most businesses leave their Black Friday planning until just a few days before, but this means they are missing the opportunity to get ahead of their competition and achieve the best possible results. We strongly advise that you have your campaigns ready to go 2 weeks (if not 1 month) ahead of time. This allows you to avoid any unforeseen delays such as ads being disapproved by Google which will delay your campaigns from going live. Also, preparing in advance means you can launch your campaigns earlier and get the jump on competitors by offering customers an early Black Friday deal.

Another advantage of running your Black Friday campaigns before the Black Friday weekend is that you may actually benefit from lower average CPCs. As Black Friday approaches and lots of advertisers join the auctions you’ll more than likely see the average cost/click begin to increase due to more competition across your keywords. If you launch your campaigns early, there will be less competition across those keywords and you’ll benefit from lower CPCs, a higher return on investment and a strong start to your Black Friday campaigns.

2. Use Black Friday Promo Extensions Google Ads offers multiple promotion extensions for Responsive Search Ads – with one specifically themed to Black Friday (although there’s also one for Cyber Monday too). Taking advantage of this will make your offers more prominent across the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Promotion extensions in Google Ads are specifically designed to promote special sale events, but they’re often overlooked despite the fact that they can have a very positive effect on conversion rates. You can create a Promo Extension based on either a monetary discount or a percentage discount, you can also add a Promo Code for customers to use to access your offers. Just don’t forget to pause (or set end dates) once Black Friday is over!

3. Use Dynamic Countdown Timers  Create urgency within your ad copy by including a dynamic timer (another underused feature in Google Ads). This will allow you to specify how many days and hours of your Black Friday campaign remain to potential customers. You can drive a high CTR (click-through rate) across ads as your promotion enters its final hours. Countdown Timers are the perfect addition to your ad copy and can be used to create a sense of urgency and encourage the potential customer searching for your product or service to take action sooner rather than later. Don’t forget that once your countdown is over your ad will no longer run or show in search results even though it will be marked as active and approved in the ad platform. You have 3 options to get around this issue; you can update the ad’s countdown end date to a future time, you can have a generic ad (without a countdown) in your ad group, or you can remove the ad’s countdown parameters altogether. To add a countdown timer, simply go into one of your ads and enter “{” into a headline or description field and the Countdown option will appear.

4. Leverage Remarketing Did you know, on average you lose 96% of the people who visit your site? With only about 4% of site visitors converting on their first visit. This is where remarketing comes in. A strategic remarketing campaign can bring those people back to your site and turn them into paying customers. Google Analytics allows you to create custom audiences which you can then import into Google Ads for use within your campaigns. Some audiences we would recommend include users who have visited your website within the last 30, 60 and 90 days. Using these audiences, you could look to create a display or a Search remarketing (RLSA) campaign to target users who have visited your site but not converted in the last 30/60/90s days.

The Black Friday offers could spark these users’ interest, drive them back to the website and push them to complete their purchase. You could also look to retarget customers who have converted in the last 12 months with your Black Friday deals too. 5. Add “Black Friday” Into Your Ad Copy One of the oldest best practices is to make sure your ads are relevant. One of the best (and easiest) ways to do that is to reference Black Friday directly in the ad copy. If you want the biggest impact for the least amount of effort, simply change the second headline to text referencing your Black Friday offer – you can add it to your descriptions too! Black Friday is a big deal for consumers, and they will be much more engaged with your campaigns if the ads match their level of excitement. It’s also a good idea to add a Black Friday sitelink extension to direct users to that part of your site. The below example from The Perfume Shop is a great example of adding how effective adding Black Friday-themed ad copy to headlines, descriptions and sitelink extensions can be. 

  How GlowMetrics Can Help There is still time to implement a Google Ads strategy to deliver maximum success this Black Friday. Our team of Google Ads Specialists are getting amazing results for our eCommerce clients. Get in touch today to find out how we can help grow your business.