As we head into the much anticipated holiday season, businesses both big and small have the opportunity to benefit from Black Friday (or, depending on your business’s viewpoint, anti-Black Friday) digital marketing and programmatic advertising tactics. If you’re not taking advantage of the biggest shopping season of the year by preparing your entire strategy, you may be missing out on a very lucrative month for you or your client’s business.
Take a look at our next installment of the series: Advertising Strategies pt. 2: Cyber Monday & Retargeting Tuesday.
Want to make a splash this holiday season? Consider implementing the Black Friday advertising strategies listed below.
Leverage last year’s holiday campaign data
If you ran any promotions or advertisements last year, take a look at that data and find out which keywords, content, targeting, and promotions yielded the best results. This will provide fantastic insight and take some of the guesswork out for where you should start this year. Accordingly, start your ads before the week of Thanksgiving (AKA, start now!) This will allow for less expensive CPM’s, increased reach, and a little less noise in the marketplace for your ads to break through.
Focus on online & mobile
Online shopping has eclipsed in-store shopping during Black Friday weekend this past year, with a 21% uplift in online shopping, the second-largest online shopping day in US history, according to this article by TechRadar. We know we preach it all the time, but preparing your brand(s) for both online and mobile shopping all the way through Retargeting Tuesday is crucial to reaching a higher number of targeted customers. Cheatsheet: mobile-specific ad sizes are 300×50 and 320×50.
Keep tabs on campaigns and optimize
Whether your target KPIs are for CTR, CPA, CPC, or any other goal, we recommend waiting about a week before you make adjustments to your ad groups. With this amount of time under your belt, you’ll be able to see more accurate data on your results and decide where to make changes. Likewise, keep an eye on your campaign throughout its duration to make sure the pacing, win rate, and other goals stay on track.
Be smart about increased competition
During the holiday season last year, we saw increased competitiveness when placing ads (34.07% decrease of win rates) while CPM costs were maintained. Since digital shopping is becoming more powerful each year, this trend is forecasted to continue. With this information in mind, be sure to adjust your budget accordingly and open up your strategy to new tactics like category targeting, site list targeting, and geo-location targeting which are free of any data targeting costs and will lower your overall CPM.
