The Halloween decorations have been packed away, the clocks have gone back and people are tentatively mentioning the word 'Christmas'. Yes,the festive season is on the way! Going hand-in-hand with this time of year is shopping – and Black Friday is the ideal occasion for both stores to increase sales, and customers to find bargains.
Black Friday has its roots in the American Thanks giving holiday, which takes place on the last Thursday of November – it's tradition for stores to offer their products for discounted prices, leading to increased footfall. In recent years, the practice has spread online, with websites now rolling out 'Black Friday Weekend' to try and entice customers into buying their products.
A great way to do this is by using Pay-Per-Click advertising. As website owners only pay each time their ad is clicked, it's a much better way to gain click throughs to a landing page than paying for an ad based on the impressions they get. But once that click has been won, what next? What can you do to turn those browsers into buyers?
Let's take a look at some great PPC strategies for Black Friday…
According to industry research, shoppers in 2020 switched brands in the search for better value, convenience, quality and sustainability. With Black Friday providing more sets of eyes for your brand, why not use this to promote your approach in each of these areas? You can build brand awareness with PPC – driving more traffic by using contextual language that will place ads on the sites that you know that your ideal audience will be looking at.
Prep is everything – no great cake was ever baked without getting everything ready beforehand. While creating your PPC ads, you shouldn't just raise your bids and budget on existing search campaigns; spend time planning which of your products you are wanting to focus on and create dedicated campaigns for them.
You should also create a Black Friday-specific landing page for your PPC ads to deliver browsers to. Aside from giving you a platform to promote your deals, having one in place communicates a sense of professionalism to your audience –they won't need to go through your site to find deals. Some retailers even create these pages weeks before the actual date to whip up interest – and to promote some 'special deals' if users pre-register their e-mail address.
PPC ad extensions are a great way to highlight Black Friday offers; further encouraging users to go ahead and click – think about creating specific site link extensions for key products that you wish to push (i.e.'/BlackFridayBeautyDeals'). Extensions can also be used to advertise the rest of your promotions – a PPC ad telling browsers to 'enter in promo code BLACKFRIDAY' for one item informs them that you have a Black Friday sale on throughout the rest of your catalogue too.
As you're building your Black Friday search campaigns, don't stick to the same static text template; experiment using ad customisers to give them a fresh, exciting dynamic. As an example – using a countdown function ono ne ad will create a sense of urgency by informing the user how long they've got left to get the deal. The fear of missing out on such a bargain will likely help to drive a clickthrough and a sale.
It isn't just new customers you can attract with your Black Friday PPC ads; previous customers can be enticed too. The bonus is that they will already know your brand, so they'll be more likely to be interested in purchasing more items. You can alert your previous customers by using Black Friday-specific remarketing ads or by using their opt-in to send them e-mails.
Those were just five great PPC strategies you should be using to market your eCommerce website for Black Friday. In need of more advice on how to get the best from your online ads? Why not consider the expert advice from us here at PPC Junkies?
Here at PPC Junkies, we are a leading digital advertising agency that has many years of experience in providing rewarding ad campaigns for a varying array of businesses. No matter if you're a relatively small, local businesses or one that offers services on a national or international platform, we are able to help you to get your services out there, promoting them to a wide but specific audience.
If you'd like further information about what we do and how we can help your business to improve its visibility online (especially during busy sales periods as Black Friday), do not hesitate to get in touch with us today. For an informal chat, you can call us on 0118 380 0204 – or send us an e-mail enquiry to sales@ppcjunkies.co.uk and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.