Getting Ready for Black Friday: Campaign Best Practices
As a supplement to Marin’s 7 Holiday Shopping Best Practices Guide and The 17 Digital MarketingTrends, Publishers, and Best Practices Every Retailer Needs to Know white paper, we have compiled some additional Adwords campaign best practices to help with your digital strategy during this holiday season.
- Landing page changes
It is recommended not to make major changes to your site right before Black Friday. The week leading up to Black Friday should be spent performing quality assurance. You do not want your site crashing or expired promotions on your site. In addition, you can set up an alert within Marin to make sure you have tracking set up. - Brand-term bidding
For your brand terms, Marin allows for the targeting of top positions with position-based bidding. We recommend a range of 1.0-1.3, as an average of anything higher is virtually impossible and will lead to over-bidding. Brand terms usually have a significantly higher conversion rate than non-brand terms. - A/B testing
Perform your A/B creative tests well before Thanksgiving week to find creatives that will perform well during Black Friday weekend. PPC advertising tools like Marin allows forcreative A/B testing and determines winners based on your chosen digital marketing KPIs. Contact your Marin representative on how to best use dimensions to enhance your A/B creative testing across your entire account. Black Friday is not the best time to try new, untested ad copy. - Refine negative keyword list
Remove unwanted spend by adding negative keywords from search query reports. Google Adwords, Google Keyword Planner tool generates a list of negative keyword suggestion based on thresholds of impressions, clicks, and or conversions set by the user. - Daily and monthly budgets
Review budgets to make sure your campaigns are not constrained in anticipation of volume increases during this period. Please revisit your 2015 spend levels for the Black Friday weekend to determine a starting point for your 2014 budgets. Also keep in mind that Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall in different months this year, so adjust monthly budgets accordingly.
Getting Ready for Black Friday: Marin Functionality Best Practices
To make the most of your Black Friday sales, here are some tactical best practices to make sure that your campaigns are running smoothly during Black Friday week.
Ad and keyword creations
Bulk uploading holiday ads and keywords in paused status at least a week before Black Friday will allow enough time for publisher editorial review. On average, object creations take 4 times longer than ‘modifies’ to get approved. Also, we recommend going live with specific campaigns or groups if possible. This method will keep your keywords live, but your campaigns and/or groups can remain paused until you’re ready to go live.
- Keyword bid changes
We recommend staggering your bid changes the week of Black Friday with the most important keywords pushed first. This will ensure that your top priority keywords go live first. For accounts with large keyword sets, we recommend building a dimension called Type to prioritize the keywords for this push. You can assign a ‘priority number’ for your keywords based upon the following criteria:
- Priority “1”: Filter condition is >0 conversions.
- Priority “2”: Filter condition is 0 conversions and >0 clicks.
- Priority “3”: Filter condition is 0 clicks and >0 impressions.
- Priority “4”: For new keywords without data. These can be filtered based on creation date.
- Priority “5”: All other keywords. Filter condition is impressions = 0
- Push keywords based on numeric value starting with the “1” keywords.
- Creative changes
We recommend that you create new creatives prior to Black Friday then activate new creatives and pause old creatives synchronously. It is strongly not recommended to make massive creative edits the days leading up to Black Friday. Modifying creatives creates new ads and you will want to leave enough time for publisher editorial review. The process of activating creatives will be similar to that of keywords. First activate:
- Groups that have gained conversions. Filter condition is >0 conversions.
- Groups that have click volume. Filter condition is 0 conversions and >0 clicks.
- Groups that have impressions. Filter condition is 0 clicks and >0 impressions.
- Remainder of groups
- Quality assurance of destination URLs
Make sure that all Destination URLs have tracking ids so revenue does not go unattributed. Marin allows you to create a report that alerts you when destination URLs are missing tracking IDs. - Boost schedule
Instead of changing keyword bids across the board, consider adding a ‘Day of Week Boost’ at the campaign level for Google or the group level for Bing. This can be set to your promotion period, then adjust back after promotions end. Please revisit your 2014 performance to determine the boost schedule.
And as always, don’t forget to utilize our Google Adwords Guides Center and reach out to our support team with any questions. For support during Black Friday weekend, our live customer support will be available Black Friday, 11/28/2015.
PowerTraffick is a full service digital performance marketing company. We are a top PPC Agency that offers Google AdWords help from certified AdWords expert consultants and Pay-Per Click (PPC) campaign account managers.