Black Friday is one of the biggest sales events of the year and is now much more than a single day or weekend with many businesses now running sales throughout November. It’s also one of the most competitive periods of the year on Google Ads with so many advertisers vying for a consumer’s attention and Google Shopping ads are key to getting your products in front of potential customers. This guide outlines effective strategies to ensure your campaigns are prepared to capture the surge in online shopping activity during this peak season.
Understanding Google Shopping
Google Shopping ads are now run through Performance Max campaigns and they allow businesses to showcase products at the top of Google search results as well as dynamically targeting people across other Google platforms and the Google Display Network. To optimise these campaigns for Black Friday, it’s crucial to ensure you are providing Google with accurate product data, clear images of your products and competitive pricing.
Managing Google Shopping Costs During Black Friday
Google Shopping ads work on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, where advertisers pay each time someone clicks on their ad. During Black Friday, competition intensifies, often leading to higher average CPCs. However, the increased demand and CVR is also significant and often justifies the increased investment during this time. Budgeting effectively and monitoring bid strategy performance closely can help manage costs while maximising visibility and sales during this key period.
How to Optimise Your Google Shopping Campaigns for Black Friday
1. Ensure Product Feed Data is Accurate
The product feed is the backbone of your Google Shopping campaign. Ensure core product attributes (e.g. price, title, description, availability, delivery details) are accurate and up-to-date. Errors or mismatches between the feed and site can cause disapprovals, preventing your products from showing ads. Clear, high-quality images are vital and can increase click-through rates and traffic to your products. Populate any missing or incorrect GTINs and ensure the Google Product Category is using the most relevant value possible to allow Google to better classify your products.
Regular checks on your product feed are essential, especially during the high-volume Black Friday period, to ensure all products are displaying the correct information and compliant with Google’s policies.
2. Enhance Product Data Attributes
To maximise exposure of your products across Google shopping, additional details can be added to the feed attributes to enhance the targeting and improve Google’s understanding of each product. There are a number of different ways to enhance the feed data, including:
- Populating additional product attributes in the feed data – This can include attributes such as colour, material, product highlights, product details & more. The more information you provide Google about each product the better.
- Including relevant keywords in the feed data – This is most commonly added into either the title, product type or product description and helps Google to better match your products to relevant search queries.
- Use custom labels to label key products & create campaign segments – This can be used to gain greater control over bid strategies & budget allocation on specific groups of products that you want to prioritise (e.g. high discount products or best sellers)
3. Utilise Sale Price & Merchant Promotions
Highlighting your Black Friday deals is essential, as customers actively seek discounts. Showing these offers in your Shopping ads can attract clicks over your competitors’ ads.
If your offer has markdown pricing on individual products, then the sale price attribute in the product feed should be used to inform Google that it is a temporary price reduction. As a result Google will highlight this in the Shopping ad by adding the ‘Sale’ callout on the product image and will also highlight the sale price in green with the full price alongside with a strike-through.
If your Black Friday offer works with a code or discount applied automatically at checkout instead of markdown on the product page itself then you should use Merchant Promotions. These are set up in Google Merchant Center and can be scheduled in advance. Once the merchant promotion is active, it will look like the DUSK examples in the screenshot below with the discount message (e.g. 20% Off) added as a callout on the product image and the price once the code is applied shown with a clickable link that will open a pop-up to display the code.
4. Leverage Smart Bidding Strategies
Performance Max campaigns use Google’s automated bidding strategies, such as Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) or Maximise Conversion Value. Using these strategies helps to maximise your performance, using machine learning to analyse historical data and real-time signals to optimise towards your campaign goals by dynamically adjusting your bids.
5. Increase Budget Allocation
With the increased competition and consumer demand around Black Friday, it’s crucial to ensure you’re allocating enough budget to your campaigns for the month and that is paced effectively throughout the month. Even if you don’t start your offers until later in the month, search demand will grow throughout the month, peaking on Black Friday itself. Monitor your campaign’s performance closely and be prepared to adjust your budget dynamically in response to real-time sales performance and market conditions. When you get into Black Friday itself we find in-day budget trackers helpful to alert us if any campaigns are likely to hit their budget before the end of the day – you don’t want to miss out on potential customers because your campaign ran out of budget before the end of the day on Black Friday.
6. Analyse and Adapt
Continuous monitoring and analysis of campaign performance is important. Use Google Analytics and Google Ads reports to track metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend. Identify which products and strategies are performing best, and be agile in adapting your campaign in real-time to maximise results.
Optimising your Google Shopping campaigns for Black Friday requires a strategic approach, with product feed data, smart bidding strategies and budget management all key to capitalising on the opportunity and maximising your sales.
Ready to make the most of Black Friday? Start working with specialists like us (to optimise your campaigns) today.
