The Ultimate Paid Media Guide for Black Friday and Christmas Planning

With the Black Friday and Christmas shopping period fast approaching, now is the time to plan what you intend to do for your business’ PPC activity.

Our below guide will help you get the most out of your “peak” paid media activity:

Confirm what offer, if any, that you’re going to run

If you are going to run a Black Friday offer, have a clear plan on what products will be discounted. Furthermore, ensure that your offer is worthwhile to the consumer.

Understand the marketplace

Review last year’s data to understand the changes in consumer behaviour so you can allocate budgets accordingly. This can be done through Google Trends and Google Ads data where you can identify when search interest begins to increase in general (Google Trends) and in your industry (Google Ads). 

By creating a custom column (found at the end of this guide), you’ll be able to map changes in search demand within Google Ads. This information can help you identify the keywords with the most seasonal growth based on historic trends, which can be used for budget allocation.

Furthermore, by using Google Ads’ Auction insights data, you’ll get an idea of the main players during the seasonal shopping period and how aggressive they are. This, in turn, can help to inform how much budget you want to allocate towards your seasonal activity.

Reviewing your data before peak will ensure that you have strong reporting foundations for your campaigns. It is a simple step but one that is often overlooked.

Review your conversion tracking

Use the time before “peak” to ensure that your conversion tracking is recording conversions accurately and that you’re recording meaningful, business-critical interactions within your analytics platform. This will help you optimise your activity towards what’s important for your business.

Aligning your reporting

It is important to align your reporting views across the business. This is primarily due to tracking pixels and GA4 offering different attribution models, which in turn can paint a very different picture depending on what’s used. Generally, pixels will paint that platform in the best light, whilst Google Analytics offers several reporting options. That being said, in many instances, GA4 data can’t be optimised by many platforms; with Google Ads and SA360 being the exceptions.

Top tip 1: ensure your conversion window covers the time it takes to typically convert.

Top tip 2: integrate your paid social accounts with your GA4 account wherever possible, as this will minimise attribution differences. Furthermore, if you’re using GA4 for reporting, rely on GA4’s data-driven attribution reports (found in the advertising tab) rather than session and first-user reports, as this paints the best picture of the role different campaigns play in a conversion.

Ensure that you’re not duplicating conversions

It is possible that you may be using a combination of conversion actions such as GA4 and Google Ads conversions to optimise to. Ensure that you’re not over-inflating your conversions by ensuring that you only use one type of tracking pixel.

Using the correct conversion metrics

The default conversion metrics in Google Ads are based on when the ad click took place rather than when the conversion took place. As a result, attribution takes place and conversion reporting can be delayed by several days, so don’t make decisions on optimisation when you have incomplete data.

Top tip: if you need to make regular, proactive changes to your campaigns over a short period of time make use of the “conversion by time” metrics found within Google Ads. These attributes are based on when the conversion took place rather than the time of the ad click. This provides a more accurate representation of what your Google Ads activity did on a particular day and updates more quickly than the default metrics. These metrics will then help you make more proactive optimisations than solely relying on the default metrics

It is important to review your ads ahead of time to ensure that they’re as good as they could be.

Keep it product & audience relevant

Whatever ad copy that you run with, and this applies regardless of seasonality, is to make it personable to your target audience whilst focusing on how they stand to benefit by purchasing your product or service. Ensure that the ad copy also adequately reflects your brand positioning by maintaining your brand’s tone of voice to ensure you provide a consistent experience to potential customers.

Top tip: use quality score metrics and ad strength to understand how well your ads are performing. If your ad strength and quality scores are low, then these ads should be prioritised for improvement. Improving ad strength and quality scores will help with click costs and visibility.

Make it seasonal

Making your ad copy timely will help to improve its relevance to potential customers. Always ensure that you highlight any sales or discounts that might be taking place across the site where relevant, as this will help to maximise the visibility of your brand’s promotion.

Top tip: pinning promotional-specific headlines will help to ensure your search ads maximise the likelihood of your promotional messaging being seen in the headlines and descriptions.

Make use of promotional extensions

Adding promotional extensions to your ads will not only increase the visibility of your promotion, but when served in conjunction with your ad, they’ll help you take up more space in the search engine results page; increasing the likelihood of your ad receiving a click from a potential customer. These promotional extensions can highlight a multitude of offers and discounts, so you can highlight numerous offers that are available on your site at the same time.

Using countdown timers

To increase the scarcity and urgency of your offers, include countdown timers in your ads. These can appear in both your headlines and descriptions of your text ads and countdown from 5 days before the end of your sale or promotion right until it has ended. These automatically update based on how long is remaining of your sale and provide added context to the potential customer about how much longer they have to claim the discount.

PMAX, shopping and catalogue campaigns have the highest purchase intent out of the various campaigns across paid media. As such, it is imperative that you ensure that your product feed is as detailed and granular as possible. You will get the best performance out of your shopping activity by ensuring your product feed includes the following:

• Your products make use of product identifiers (GTINs, Product IDs or MPNs)
• Your products are in the most relevant product category as per your platform’s taxonomy
• Your product titles and descriptions are full of relevant information and make use of keywords and terms that you want your product to appear for 
• Your product type usage is consistent and as granular as possible, as this will help with product and campaign segmentation

Top tip 1: use custom labels to provide additional insight about how your products are being promoted in the platform. You can include price brackets, bestsellers, product margin information and more, as this will assist with product and campaign segmentation and make reporting quicker and easier.

Top tip 2: ensure that your product feed is regularly updated and sent to Merchant Center, as this will avoid feeds expiring and help to ensure stock levels are updated as close to real-time as possible.

This is particularly important given the rise of automated bidding. Whilst the general rule of thumb is to group your campaigns as granularly as possible, providing a relevant customer experience, you must ensure that enough conversion data is passed to allow the algorithm to perform efficiently. Typically, there should be over 30 conversions being tracked over a 30-day period, but the more tracked conversions the better. Review your conversion data and find the best campaign structure that offers the best mix of volume and granularity for your business based on the performance during the past quarter before peak hits.

Ensure that your landing pages provide a good user experience (UX), including: highlighting the benefits the purchaser gains by purchasing that product or service and visually appealing product imagery that showcases your product in the best possible light. Furthermore, ensure the site speed is quick and that any movement from onscreen elements is minimal. 

To ensure that you make the most of the opportunity peak provides, analyse historical data to understand when interest for your products and services increases and peaks, as this will help you with budget allocation and pacing.

Top tip 1: monitoring consumer demand across your product listings and keywords can be easily achieved by a custom column in Google Ads. To do so, simply create a custom column using the following formula in Google Ads:

Impressions / (1-(Search Lost IS rank + Search Lost IS budget))

Using this custom metric will have the following benefits:

• Help you track consumer demand over time. This combined with auction insights will help you understand how aggressive the marketplace will be and provide you with context about how achievable your goals are.
• Map when consumer demand begins to increase and help you make a more accurate forecast
• Whilst in Google Ads’ reporting sandbox, you can identify the product categories that can be pushed and have also experienced changes in consumer demand and competition over time.

Top tip 2: make use of the impression share lost due to budget and impression share lost due to rank metrics when running your peak activity across Google. These metrics will help you understand whether you’re able to just increase your budgets or whether you need to also adjust your ROAS targets.