Is your eCommerce site ready for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday rush?
These originally American traditions look like they are definitely here to stay within British culture; with a long weekend (and more recently a month!) of discounting in-store (Black Friday) and online (Cyber Monday). The hype of these events has gained more and more momentum over the years, and it now has a considerably well known reputation for causing chaos in stores with fights and mad rushes.
So your site might be ready, but to ensure that you get the absolute most out of these events then you should be looking at increasing your slice of the pie with Google Ads (PPC). We've discussed some of the questions that you should be asking before you start your campaign...
1. Who is my audience?
Although it might go without saying, it is absolutely crucial that you know which customers you are trying to engage with. You might have a variety of audience segments, and therefore one of these might be more responsive to discounted offers than a different segment.
Therefore you should be thinking about the different demographics too:
- Are they a local market? Where are they located?
- Will they be searching for you on mobile or from a desktop/laptop.
- Age, gender etc.
These will all help when it comes to the settings and targeting of your campaigns.
2. What's my offer?
Like any good marketing campaign at any time of the year, you need to provide a solution to a customer's pain-point or problem. You'll also need to show why your business is the best at getting the desired results for your customer, this is because a massive discount might not always be enough to get consumers to buy.
Think about the following:
- What makes your business unique and different from your competitors?
- What are your key unique selling points (USP)?
- What is your Black Friday / Cyber Monday Offer to get people to click on your ads?
These will help you to write a compelling advert that will get consumers to click on your advert, and not your competitors.
3. What's my budget?
Before you dive straight in. You need to make sure that your PPC ads are going to give your business a profit, this means planning out your Google Ad budget.
With Google Ads, you set a daily budget for your campaign, and you can then decide between a number of costing structures as to how you spend that budget. The main one being Pay-Per-Click (PPC), this allows you to set your ad spend based on the number of clicks your ad gets.
Essentially: you need to know your budget limits, and base your ad spend on the returns you need.
4. What's my time frame?
However long you plan to run your ads for, will depend on how long the offer is available. As mentioned previously, in recent times it has become more and more common for companies to be offering their deals throughout the end of November, and start of December.
Just make sure that you don't start your ads too early, or let them run for too long after the sale as this can result in wasted clicks and ad spend too. Be sure to plan out your ad campaign duration!
5. How am I going to measure my results?
With Google Ads, there are many different ways to track how well your campaign is doing via differing metrics. For a Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaign on an eCommerce website, you should see how many clicks lead to a transaction and the revenue that those transactions create.
Therefore you will need to set up conversion tracking before your campaign starts. To do this, you will need to make sure that your linking up your Google Analytics account and importing your goals. This way you can analyse your results and make tweaks as you go.
If you sell online, we hope you have a great flourish in sales this Christmas, and that you deliver excellent customer service and benefit from the loyalty that this will bring for the next year.