Are you prepared for Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year? As an online retailer you should be looking to get your online advertising ready for Cyber Weekend. Cyber weekend provides retailers with a significant increase in online traffic across many industries. It is also important to consider the coronavirus’ affect on online retail and how this may even further increase Cyber Weekend this year. Searches for ‘Black Friday’ are double for November to date compared with last year.
We have also seen increases in other key retail events in November Click Frenzy and Singles Day have driven huge growth in shopping at +142% and 207% respectively.
Therefore, no matter which vertical your ecommerce business operates in, it is crucial to prepare well and make the most of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday online opportunities. The below points are a few things you may want to consider when planning for this period.
What Sales Will You Run For Cyber Weekend?
By now you will likely have a good idea of what sales you are going to run over the Cyber Weekend period. Some retailers will choose to run specific sales on specific days. Others will choose to have a generic sale running over the entire period. Often we see success with retailers who run sitewide sales or discounts over many categories and products.
So whether it is 20% or 40% off sitewide, or even something a bit more specific make sure your offer is enough to entice shoppers to buy.
Push Your Sales Through Ad Copy & Extensions
Now that you have decided what sales you will be running, it is important that you incorporate them into your online advertising. This can be done in a few ways.
For search ads you may want to update your existing ad copy such as your headlines and descriptions to include your offers. This is the clearest way to display your offers as headlines and descriptions form the main section of your search ad.
You may also want to look at apply promotional and sitelink extensions to your search ads. These will show in addition to the main section of your search ad.
Google Shopping ads will automatically recognise pricing drops and depending on the extent of the drop and the length of time the price is changed for, they may automatically call out the sale on your ads in the form of a price drop sticker.
Review Your Landing Pages & Online Banners
As you have now ensured the sales you are running are featured in your ad copy and other online advertising, it is a good idea to call these sales out on your landing pages. Having sale banners or updated messaging on your website landing pages in line with the sales means that the sale ads are more relevant. If you have ‘Cyber Weekend Deals Available’ in your ad copy and the ad takes the user to a landing page that contains all of your Cyber Weekend Deals. Google will reward you for this, as it is a highly relevant ad and which leads to a great user experience.
So, if you have time, it may be worth creating a specific landing page or website banner to promote what you are offering over Cyber Weekend.
Uncap Your Budgets In Preparation For Cyber Weekend
Consider a bricks and mortar retail store. As a business owner the worst thing you could do is shut your doors to a potential customer. If your ads are budget capped this is what you are effectively doing in the online world!
If your campaigns are showing as budget capped they could be showing more often than they are. This is even more important over Cyber Weekend because the search volume will increase further. With search queries for ‘Black Friday’ already double what they were at the same time as last year, it is worth considering doubling your daily budget. If you can, open up your budget the week before Cyber Weekend as lots of businesses start their promotions quite early. We will see shoppers change from their researching phase to purchasing quite quickly and you don’t want to miss out on that.
Simply put, don’t have your campaigns limited by budget. This means you may be missing out on increases in traffic and sales. You could also be losing out to your competitors! You can see if your campaigns are limited by budget by looking at them at the campaign level of your Google Ads account. If they display the bellow symbol, they are capped and you may want to reassess the daily budget.
The weekend that stretches from Black Friday to Cyber Monday is undoubtedly one of the most profitable of the entire year. This is due to the significant potential that this time holds. It is absolutely crucial that online retailers begin their marketing preparations early to ensure the most successful outcomes. Cyber Weekend in 2020 is going to be a big one, so make sure your online advertising is ready!
