Since the dawn of online retail, Christmas has dominated the peak sales periods. That was until Black Friday 2014, when the US holiday reached the UK shores and the ecommerce industry encountered a surge of sales like never before!

How to Not Handle It

Despite being predicted by search trends behaviour; this rush of demand was totally underestimated and retailers saw a 28% traffic increase between November and December 2014 vs 2013…all thanks to Black Friday, Manic Monday and Cyber Monday.

Many retail sites crashed under the sheer volume of searchers on the look-out for bargain deals, however this presented a huge opportunity for smaller retailers who mopped up sales where the market leader sites were unable to cope.

PPC Campaigns At The Ready…

Ensure you don’t make the same mistakes last year!

Here are the top 6 tips to maximise Black Friday sales:

1.      Sitelinks

If you’re not keen on creating 1000s of new ads for the sake of 1 day/weekend, make the most of scheduling your sitelinks.

Creating new sitelinks that are only live for 27^th November (or the weekend if your deals are running for 72 hours) will direct shoppers to bespoke Black Friday deal pages.

2.      Shopping

Want to promote your killer offers via Google Shopping? Promotions feed is the way to go!

Black Friday (and Christmas in general) is a great time to set up your Promotions feed in Merchant Center and flag your discounts to purchase-ready shoppers, whether you’ve got discounts on all products or just a select few.

You can upload your feed via XML (the usual way to upload your shopping feed) or via the +PROMOTION tool in the Merchant Center. Once live, this adds a “Special Offer” link to your shopping ad and gives shoppers an extra incentive to click your ad and purchase.

3.  Keywords

Despite being a traditionally electronics sale, Black Friday search volume now spans many product lines. It’s a good idea to conduct some new keyword research to see if shoppers are looking for deals on your products.

Create a new campaign to target these temporary shoppers, so you can assign a separate budget. If you set up this ad group in an existing campaign, you run the risk of Black Friday search traffic taking budget away from your ad groups that are already performing well.

4.      Remarketing

Entice previous visitors, basket abandoners and past purchasers back on-site with the promise of fantastic Black Friday deals via flash sale remarketing ads – both single image and dynamic.

As the offer is for a limited time only, it’s worth expanding your remarketing lists from 30 days to 90 days, so you can get your ads in the eyeline of Christmas present researchers who started their search way back in September!

5.      Social

Both Facebook and Twitter offer remarketing audience targeting, so make sure you recreate your AdWords ads for social platforms too.

Plus, if you’re emailing previous customers/newsletter subscribers with the latest deals, make sure they see this message on Facebook and Twitter as well – you can do this by uploading email addresses to both platforms, so you can target your loyal fans with ease.

6.      Callouts

Similar to sitelinks, adding callout extensions does a fantastic job of improving click-through rates.

Again, you can schedule callouts, so they will automatically pause once Black Friday is over – no manual pausing required!

From everyone at Mediaworks, we hope you have a very merry Black Friday and your sales success continues well into the Christmas and January sale period!

Remember to download our white paper for further advice and tips, and if you have any questions, get in touch today.