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6 Hints To Hone Your PPC Strategy For Black Friday

6 Hints To Hone Your PPC Strategy For Black Friday 6
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It’s open-season for online shoppers right now. With Black Friday on the horizon, not to mention  Cyber Monday shortly afterwards – some are referring to this online free-for-all as Cyber Week.

Gone are the days where Black Friday was exclusively a United States affair. The advent of online shopping has meant that nations all over the world, including Singapore, have been taking their share of the savings – or profit.

E-Commerce store owners simply must jump on the bandwagon. The question is, how can you take advantage of the spend-friendly climate with your PPC strategy? Here, we’ll provide 6 handy hints to help hone your PPC strategy over the peak online spending period.

 

1. Boost Your Budget

We’re getting this tip out the way first and foremost. With dramatically increased search traffic including the term “Black Friday”, competition is naturally higher for ad airtime with those keywords. According to Google, mobile search volume for terms containing “Black Friday” increased by 80% from 2014 – 2016.

There’s no way around it: Business owners must allocate a higher budget for Black Friday. Although this may cause some initial pain, it’s worth it if the campaign is well-executed.

 

2. Target Your Market

To make the most sales on Black Friday, you need to understand who you’re selling to. That may be Marketing 101, but its importance cannot be overstated. Creating promotions is much easier when you know who you’re catering to.

An easy and fun way of identifying your target market is to create buyer personas, also known as customer avatars. These can form the foundations of each PPC campaign you run, whether they’re on Google Search Ads, Display, or Shopping.

 

3. Use Keywords With High Intent

Searchers who intend to buy input keywords with high intent. The ground is unusually ripe for cashing in on these keywords around Black Friday, as the population of active online shoppers peaks.

If searchers find the answer to their questions on your site, there’s a stronger chance of conversion.  Weaving in keywords with high transactional intent, such as “buy”, “Black Friday sale”, “discount” along with product names yields stronger returns for businesses. This especially applies if you’re running a Google Shopping campaign!

 

4. Go Mobile

Online orders on mobile now officially outnumber desktop for Black Friday sales. In 2017, 47% of  Black Friday orders were from desktop, losing out to mobile at 53%. Interestingly, this was a direct inverse of 2016’s figures. This further cements that a mobile strategy is non-negotiable in the E-Commerce sphere.

We’ve frequently spoken about mobile-first indexing and the trend towards mobile as a whole. It’s recommended to create mobile-targeted ads with mobile bid modifiers, so your PPC strategy can target the top spots on mobile devices.

 

5. Update Your Ads

If your ads don’t show off any upcoming sales, your target market will bypass them. Draw attention by mentioning sales in the ad copy, refining sitelinks in ads to direct traffic to high-demand products, and setting up promotion extensions.

Promotion extensions add an extra line of text highlighting your Black Friday sale, along with its duration. Ads geared toward specific occasions, products and market segments bring in superior ROI to ads with a general focus.

 

6. Create Excitement

Creating urgency surrounding upcoming sales instills excitement among customers. Uploading themed banners on your site, creating landing pages (along with specially-curated ads for them) and drawing attention to the upcoming sales bonanza all contribute to setting the stage for more ROI.

One way to incite anticipation is by displaying a countdown to any big sales on your PPC ads. Don’t know how to input this data? Google has got you covered – for their ads, at least. Now go build some momentum and get potential customers excited!

We hope that these tips have given you some solid guidelines to inform your Black Friday PPC strategy. While this blog focused on PPC hints, that’s not all we have on offer for you: Check out our recent post for 5 Last-Minute Tips To Boost Sales And Web Traffic This Black Friday. 

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