How to get your Google Shopping campaigns ready for Black Friday

Here are our top tips for getting your Google Shopping campaigns ready for Black Friday.

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1. Analyse past performance 

Take a look at your Google Shopping data from 2020 and 2019, as well as other promotional periods throughout the course of the year such as your summer or mid-season sales. Have a look at how your customers have responded to your ads in the past and see what worked and what didn’t work. 

Look for your best performing ads and products, keywords you can reuse and other performance metrics so that these insights can inform your strategy this year to help get the most from your budget. 

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2. Fix any feed errors 

The Google Merchant Centre will show any warnings, errors or notifications that appear in your Shopping feed. Before Black Friday, you should go in and fix as many errors or bugs as possible to make sure your products are eligible for Shopping campaigns. 

If there are too many errors to fix, just focus on solving the products with the best results, despite the errors and this will allow you to focus on your top 10% products. 

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3. Create a separate Black Friday Shopping campaign 

Over the Black Friday weekend, shoppers are looking for the best deals and promotions on the products they want. 

You should already have an idea of the products you want to offer and the deals you’re going to run so break out all of the products you want to promote into a separate Black Friday campaign. This will allow you to track the success of the products over the weekend and allow you to raise bids on those items with a blanket adjustment that could be too aggressive for your regular campaigns. Keep an eye on popular products too and adjust the bids where necessary. 

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4. Start promotions before Black Friday to attract researchers 

Most companies will look to increase their Google Shopping bids throughout the duration of the Black Friday weekend to make the most of the additional traffic. Due to increased competition, the CPC is likely to rise during the weekend. We recommend upping your bids a few weeks before the actual weekend to capitalise on the customers who are already researching their Black Friday purchases. 

A few weeks before, many shoppers will already be looking at what to buy, where from and who from. This results in a surge of traffic leading up to Black Friday. Increasing your bids will ensure that these motivated shoppers are able to find your products and your website. Enticing them now will also allow you to retarget them over the weekend once all of your campaigns are in full swing. 

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5. Optimise your campaigns  

Optimising your Google Shopping campaigns in advance of the Black Friday weekend will give you the best chance of success. 

Your product titles, descriptions and imagery will indicate to a customer whether or not your ad is worth clicking on. So making sure your product feed is fully optimised will help to improve click through rates and encourage customers to buy from you, rather than your competitors. 

Make sure your stock availability is up to date as well as your pricing information. The lowered prices you’ll be offering over the weekend will need to be reflected in your feed and should match the reduced prices on your website. If you don’t lower the price in your feed, your ads will show the original price which can affect performance. There is also a strong likelihood that Google will spot the discrepancy and disapprove your ads. 

Improve product titles and descriptions 

This is one of the best ways to improve ad performance but you might not see results straight away. 

Your brand name should be included first in your title structure and you should always try to mimic customer language when writing them.

Your product descriptions should include additional key information about your products to help attract new traffic. Optimise your product descriptions by using shopping term reports and keyword research which will help to make sure they match high traffic terms. You should then include key information about your products to entice users such as: 

• Your brand name 
• Product type 
• Size 
• Material 
• Age range 
• Special features 

By making these small improvements and telling customers everything about the products you offer, you can help to improve the conversion rates of your campaigns. 

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6. Use negative keywords 

Adding negative keywords to your Shopping campaigns is one of the only ways to control the search terms that your products show for. You can add these to filter out customers who are not looking for what you’re offering.

This is a great way to avoid spending your budget on users who are not going to purchase from you and provides you with more budget to spend on the customers who will buy from you. Keep your eye on converting and non converting search terms so that you can exclude the terms that are not relevant to your business. 

Regularly look at your search term query report to find out more about how users are getting to your website and how your budget is being spent. This is another way to find keywords that can be added to your negative list. 

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7. Update your remarketing lists 

To get everything out of your Google Shopping and other digital marketing spend, Google RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) can help to get your brand back in front of the people who have already visited your website in the run up to Black Friday. This can provide a better chance of converting these customers as they already have some knowledge of your brand. 

If you have enough data in your CRM, customer match can help to drive sales. You could use a list of people who have made a purchase with your brand during previous Black Friday weekends and upload it to your Google Ads account before Black Friday. This will allow you to target potential customers with similar interests or demographic information to people who have bought from you before. 

Getting your Google Shopping campaigns right over Black Friday can help you to capitalise on the increase in traffic and customers who are in the market to buy your products. Following the above steps will help you to get your campaigns in order and make sure you get as much from your budget as possible. 

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