Is Your Brand Ready For BFCM? How To Crush It With Google Ads in 2022.
Five days into Q4, brands around the world have buckled down and begun planning their Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns. In this article, I will share how you can use Google Search Ads to get the most out of this BFCM season. Let’s hit those revenue goals.
First and foremost, although I’m focusing this article on Google Search Ads, Google also provides advertisers with an array of products and platforms to advertise on. Additionally its super important to leverage other platforms, like Meta and TikTok (and Email and SMS), to help our BFCM campaigns hit their full potential. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts!
- Be Prepared For Higher CPCs
Over BFCM weekend, everyone and their mother will be searching for “Best Black Friday Deals” and similar terms. This means that every brand will also bid on those Keywords. It’s important to know that, during BFCM, most customers don’t always know what they want. They just search for deals in hopes of landing on a good one that they also like. Put spend behind these broad keywords, and up your bids (sorry!).
It’s also always worth bidding on brand terms. This could help capture those searchers who originally landed on your store when searching for great BFCM deals, who are ready to find you again.
2. Highlight Your BFCM Offer
Creative is the biggest lever in advertising. In Paid Search, your ad copy is your creative. Get people excited about your offer. I personally like to pin the offer headline as Headline 2.
Keep in mind, relevant ads have higher Ad Rank, which means that more people will see (and click on) the ad. Keep your ad copy relevant to your keywords.
Another tip is making sure that each Headline carries a specific unique selling point. Each word in an ad is precious and important.
3. Ad extensions
It’s always best practice to add as many ad extensions as possible into each of your Google Ads campaigns, but let’s talk about the beloved promotion extension. Set your BFCM promo ($ or % off) and set your end date. Everyone knows when BFCM ends, but a reminder won’t hurt. After all, we ❤ the sense of urgency.
4. Upload Customer Match Lists
Let’s not forget about your existing customers this BFCM. If you believe that your customers will repurchase from your brand AT ALL, then you need to remarket them properly. Uploading customer lists will save you a ton of money trying to reach them with your killer BFCM offer. If you have tight tracking in place, you could skip this step, but I always like to upload customer lists anyways.
You could also upload your customer lists (as well as Email or SMS lists) to help Google’s Display and YouTube campaigns. Google will use your audience to learn about your target audience. It’s a win-win.
To do this, head to “Audience Manager” under “Tools and Settings” and upload customer lists under the “Segments” tab.
5. Landing Page
Sending an ad to a Landing Page or a Product Page is a debate of old time…but not for BFCM. Do not send BFCM campaigns to product pages. It’s highly inefficient to update your website (and change it back again).
When creating your landing page, make sure your BFCM offer is consistent with the one you put in your ad copy and extensions. This will also help Ad Rank. Make sure your page has Call To Actions everywhere. People don’t know what to do on your page, so tell them. Also, make sure tracking is tried and tested. The data you get from BFCM is important. It could even help you in 2023.
Landing page quality is correlated with Conversion Rate. Don’t lose on easy sells (with your awesome product) because you were cutting corners in the design and CRO.
That’s a Wrap!
I hope you feel at least a little bit more confident this BFCM season after reading my piece; and I even hope you learned a thing or two as well.
If you have any questions, or want to have a paid media chat with me, you can always reach me on Twitter: @ppcpia or email me directly at pia@ppcpia.com.
