Black Friday & Cyber Monday Google Ads Masterclass 2023 [Free Guide Included]

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video I have a complete free guide to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. How you should be preparing your Google Ads accounts for what's likely the biggest sales days for you or your clients. And if you hang with me until the very end, I've got the number one setting you absolutely must check. And let me tell you, 90% of people forget to do this. They that could help prevent the most devastating thing that could happen and that is absolutely zero sales on Black Fridays. I've seen it happen folks. So stick with me to the end. I'm going to show you the number one setting but before we get there, I've got the complete guide and breakdown I'm going to go through. Let's dive in. Let's hop into the guide and start with foundation offer. Okay, very simple. Your offer actually has to be good on Black Friday. So none of this really matters if you have a crappy offer. Look, 10 off is just not going to cut it. I've had clients, they still want to run a sale and then it's like a 5 or 10% off. I'm just like forget it. Just, just run your normal prices then because 10 off is not going to move the needle. People are looking for the deals on Black Friday. Listen, I, I'm one who believes you don't necessarily have to run deals on Black Friday to get an increase in sales. If you are a reseller though of products and your competitors are offering massive deals then you will lose out to them for sure. But it's either go all out if you're going to offer promotions or sales on Black Friday or just don't do it at all. But a 10% off is wasting your time. What we have seen, 20, 30% is kind of the minimum. If you're talking about like a percentage off common thread which I don't really know these guys personally. It is another agency. I like their their content so check them out. But I put their blog post here. They have data on 737 of the best e commerce holiday campaigns. I thought this was wonderful. This just came out in September 2023 so a lot of this is very relevant and recent. So you'll see here site wide and select skus and free gifts etc. This is a good study I think with a lot of data to determine you know what, what seems to be competitive in regards to sales and percentages and offers. So go check this out as well. Kudos to common thread. If either somehow someone from that agency Sees this. I did put that in there. I plugged them there because I just, I think it's wonderful and it's a great resource for you to be looking at when coming up with offers. All right, Ads. Okay, so number one thing, ad copy, literally just put Black Friday in your ad copy. So Black Friday sale, Cyber Monday deals, etc. If it is a particular sort of product. So like a stove, you know, we would Black Friday stove sales, Black Friday stove deals. So simply adding Black Friday or Cyber Monday ad copy to your ads, if that's all you going to do, that will help, right? That's going to increase your click through rates. So if you do nothing else, just literally go in there and start adding Black Friday or Cyber Monday ad copy to your ads, then add labels. To me, this is very important. Make sure to add ad labels to your legacy ads or your evergreen ads and label them Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That way, when you're running auto rules to enable or pause out ads during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it makes it super easy to set those rules because you can, you set those rules based off the ad label and, and then you can flick back on your old ads again. I like to usually call them legacy or evergreen. And then your old ads can, can get flicked back on. So let me show you real quick. I'm going to hop into an account, okay, so I'm inside of an ad account and to get to the ad labels, I'm just clicking this ad here, hitting label and then I'm actually finding. So we don't have a Black Friday one. So I would hit create label and, and then I would label my Black Friday ad Black Friday. Or in this case this would be the legacy ad because I actually don't have Black Friday copy here. So this would be legacy or evergreen, whatever you want to call it. Then you would label that. So let me just apply that to this ad. This is probably going to be blocked out, but it's a typical ad. So this is my legacy ad. Then if I create the Black Friday or the Cyber Monday, I would have my Black Friday labeled to those. It comes in handy when reviewing the data. And then when I show you auto rules a little later on, the auto rule is based off of these labels. It's, it's highly important. It's not going to impact the actual performance of your account. It just impacts the efficiency of you managing the chaos of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. All right, Promotion assets, these are very, very simple to set up. Literally just add your promotion asset extension Add Black Friday, add promo codes, add the percent off. Super simple to add inside of your, you know, ad asset section of your, your ads. Make sure these promo assets are the easiest thing to set up. Go ahead and make sure you get those set up. I have check out Google Ads support page requirements for this. Some people try to add in a bunch of weird stuff that ends up getting disapproved. So don't do that. Have all of this by the way prepared at least for five days before Black Friday. Our team here, normally we're prepping Black Friday ads. We're prepping our ad labels, promotion site links, prices, everything I'm going to be going through in this guide. We're doing this usually a week minimum ahead of time. That way if we run into disapprovals or issues, we can catch it right away. So promotion asset extensions. Very valuable and easy to add. Sitelink asset extensions. This is, you know, something that a lot of people just kind of forget to do. But if you have particular campaigns or you don't even need to have particular, you could just do an account level one, but you can just go ahead and add in Black Friday sort of copy to these site links. It helps just move the needle on click through rates. So this is a little extra of a step that I see a lot of people just forget to do or not take the time because of just being lazy. But to me this is like a very easy win to get click through rates up as well. I do include the support page to Google Ads. Again, go read that. People try to sneak in other, you know, clickbaity stuff into the descriptions. This example is not showing the descriptions, these are just the headlines. But add the descriptions there too. When you go in and create these site links, don't get clickbaity though. So read the support page. I mean if you've been running ads before, you understand how to add sitelink assets. So this is probably a no brainer. Do this by, you know, campaign level too. If you have different campaigns for different product categories, make specific ones for those. It will go a long way increasing those click through rates. Price assets. Add any price assets that make sense. Again, be careful, you cannot try to add any promotional text to the headers or descriptions. So you can't add Black Friday sale or like LG TVs on sale or anything like that. It's got to be very generic. So I add the support page for you again here in this example. Super simple. It's just like LG TVs from 550 and the sizes this one sometimes, you know, you can probably avoid adding because Google doesn't necessarily always show these price assets. But if you're going to take the time to fully build out a complete Black Friday and Cyber Monday sort of preparation for your account, adding price assets where it makes sense. Another little simple ad to go ahead and do to your account. Just be careful on the ad copy you put in there. All right. Shopping ads number one, have an optimized feed. I have like a 30 minute video with a complete free guide that that's similar to like this notion guide that I have for Black Friday. Just go watch this YouTube video. This is like spent an insane amount of time building that out. But that to me is like I give you exactly what you should do to optimize your feed and the biggest needle movers there. So go check it out. It's got a free cheat sheet guide too with it. So make sure you have a nice optimized feed. Check for errors. I can't believe how many people forget to make sure their products aren't disapproved before the biggest sales days ever. It happens. They just completely forget to just look at what is Merchant center showing for my current product feed. I have seen in cases where their top products are literally disapproved, they did not catch it. And then they come. Black Friday missed out on a massive amount of sales from that. Okay, so I'm inside of Merchant Center. I all you do is go to products diagnostics. Boom, here we go. So I have in this particular account obviously I have, I'm going to have everything blocked out here. So you don't know who the client is or anything like that. But large feed and you know, unfortunately we have 8% of our products are disapproved right now. I would be reviewing now I know in this case there's a batch of products that really aren't that important to us that are disapproved for like weird reasons. And so we're aware of some of that. But we have had a bit of an uptick it looks like in the past few days. So this will be investigated. But this is, you know, I'm way ahead of before Black Friday. I would be looking at this, you know, a few weeks before Black Friday as well. I would be checking this almost daily just to make sure nothing has happened to the feed. There are things that happen, tech, technical little hiccups depending on how your feed is created and then fetched. Just keep your eye out on your Merchant center account in your feed just to make sure your Products are all approved and ready by the time Black Friday shows up. Highly important. Then set up promotions. This is super simple to do. This is huge when it comes to your shopping ads. Missing out on this is going to be missing out on a massive amount of sales. Do this ahead of time. At least five days is what I put in here before Black Friday because you want to make sure these do get approved or don't get, you know, disapproved. So add in your Black Friday deals. I'll hop into merchant Shinran and show you where to do this at. But just, just know this is, this is huge because you get the increased click through rate when you have the sale price shown. So it does, Google usually does like here's your normal price 400 and it swipes that out. It's on sale for this number. So 359 is what we're seeing. Sometimes it'll add these sale icons to your ads. This is just massive, massive improvement to increasing your click through rate. So make sure to add that and I will show you where to add that here in a second. Okay, so I'm back inside the merchant center account. What you're going to do to find and add those promotions is you go to marketing and you click promotions and you go ahead and just add it in here. Again, do this ahead of time. Five days minimum before Black Friday. It can take, you know, up to 24 hours or so to sometimes approve them. Usually Google's very quick on it and make sure you know there's no disapprovals. If there are, Google will alert you, they'll email you as long as your email gets those notifications. That is why it's super important though to have all of this prepped, ready and added inside a merchant center before Black Friday comes. You will sometimes under the status, obviously I have nothing live here right now. You will sometimes under the status though. See, let's just do if I can do so. You'll see these are like expired sometimes. You'll see where it's still like in review or pending. Well that's because it's waiting for you know the code to actually be live on the website. So don't be alerted by that. If what you want to be alerted by is if it gets disapproved, you'll see this, this, this little status icon will be red. And so you just want to make sure that Google's not disapproving it for, for whatever reason, maybe you incorrectly set something up but you won't see it say fully approved. It'll say in review still because you know if you're doing a promotion, a promo code and the promo code doesn't even exist yet on the website, sometimes Google needs to just check that. So just a heads up there, don't be alerted by that, but do make sure you're checking the status in regards to it if it actually gets rejected or disappointed approved. Okay. Keywords, this can be huge and a lot of people forget to do this. But I like doing some keyword research on actual Black Friday keywords. So for example, LG TV Black Friday deals, if you go into the keyword planner just to see if there's some search volume there. Look at that. Boom. Right on November here, at least in this graph you actually see see search volume and it gives you some CPC data there too. Now that's a huge popular product in LGTV on Black Friday, right? So there's going to be a lot of volume there. But a lot of people do forget to just add Black Friday keywords. Now if you sell something like super niche, there might not be any volume for your product that you're trying to sell with Black Friday keywords. So it may be completely a waste of time to try to go in there and add a bunch of these Black Friday specific keywords to it. But just do some keyword research. Go through Google Trends, I have an example of that as well to see if there's any interest lift during Black Friday for that even go in and just add a few in the account and see if they get triggered or not by low search volume. You know, if Google triggers that then you're kind of out of luck just if there is no volume. But in this case lgtv, Black Friday, we're good. So I would be going in and adding Black Friday specific keywords. Now don't go too crazy. I've seen people literally add like Black Friday deals. Well, you're going to murder your credit card by adding such a broad Black Friday term. So make it product specific in order to actually get some some great conversions and sales from it. Don't try to go in there and add broad Black Friday terms that you're. You'll melt a credit card doing that. I have seen that in the past. It makes absolutely no sense. So I would only be running Black Friday keywords specific to the products that I'm selling and have very competitive deals on. So I do give a little heads up. Do keyword research here first. Some of these keywords will trigger low search volume. So again, just make sure go Ahead and do that then. Competitor keywords. This is nice if you know you're going to have a better deal than your competitors or you think you will. I will go ahead and create Black Friday competitor campaigns where I'm actually going after my competitor names now and then I'm just blasting my ad copy with my deal. That is a way to steal some sales away from your competitors during these top days because there will be, you know, lots of people just searching for those particular competitors on Black Friday. And if you have a better deal, put that front and center and you guarantee you will guarantee, get, get some sales from it. Now again, if you don't have a good deal and your competitor is running great deals, then don't do this because you'll just waste money. So you have to be strategic about it. You have to understand aren't are my deals going to be competitive again? Go check out that blog post or research by Common Thread and review do do we believe we have competitive deals here? And if you have a little inside knowledge somehow of what your competitors are going to be running and you know you do, then get aggressive on this. But if you're not sure, then back off of this strategy. So because be careful with this, but I have ran this successfully in the past, but again, very, very strong deals that we had. So we were aggressive on it. Here's just a quick glimpse of, you know, Casper Mattress and you see they basically have no copy. This isn't a Black Friday specific example, but it's a good example. And here you see some of your competitor terms showing dollar amounts and things that seem very enticing compared to what Casper was showing. Campaign structures. All right, this is just super simple. You have your campaigns that you're currently running now, right? If you're going to be running site wide deals, some clients will just run a very simple site wide site sale. I don't go too crazy then on my campaign structures, I leave them as is. However, if I have a client or an account where there's certain products or product categories or brands that will be on sale and others that won't be, then I sometimes will in most cases take the time and build out segmented campaigns where I'm extremely aggressive then on those products, especially if you're running a performance max campaign and it's mixed with products that won't be on sale and then you'll have products that will be on sale, I will segment out those products that will be on sale. I will set those campaigns up earlier in advance to Black Friday warm them up and then get very aggressive on the bidding. So that is all kind of written in text here. But basically you do not want your on sale products and not on sale products mixed. And then you're going to dilute your bidding during that time because you want to be more aggressive on those products that are obviously going to increase rapidly in their conversion rates due to the aggressive deal you might be running versus products that will just be standard priced and not very competitive if other resellers or competitors are running deals on those products. So you got to be strategic about that. You should obviously already have some form of a promotion calendar or deals plan that you have set up. And so you, you should already know all of this information and have reviewed it. But this then helps strategize your campaign structure, build outs if needed. And going back up to, you know, those competitor keywords and Black Friday Cyber Monday keywords. Usually I'm running those in a separate Black Friday type campaign structure as well. A lot of times I'm not mixing those too much in my standard campaigns. If it's one or two Black Friday keywords I add, I may just throw those in my current legacy campaign for that particular sort of product or product category. That's only if I'm going to be aggressive though and run and I am running deals on those campaign wide. But if I sell TVs, my LG TV is the only TV I'm going to run a sale on. I'm probably going to start pulling LG out into its own campaign with those Black Friday keywords in there too. And my bidding is going to be absolutely more aggressive than what it is on the standard TV campaign structure. So think of what your deals are going to be, how your current campaign structures are, and then how you should be going about potentially being more aggressive on products or keywords and how you should segment that out before Black Friday. Don't do it the, the day of or a day before. I, I like doing that about a week ahead of time minimum to start warming those up as well. Budgets and bidding so very important for budgets. You want to start increasing your budgets in small increments up to one week before Black Friday. Especially if you're using smart bidding, especially if you're going to use bid changes, which we're going to talk about here right after this. But budgets, you don't want to go from your normal everyday budget and all sudden you ramp at 10x on Black Friday. I like to start incrementally increasing, by the way, volume starts trickling up, usually before Black Friday too. Interest does, at least not saying those people are buying yet, but the interest starts increasing. I like to just start slowly ticking my budget up. And then come Black Friday we, we ramp up to what we've planned, which I'll talk about. But don't just go from, all right, it's Black Friday, let's go ahead and 10x the budget. Now I like to warm that budget up beforehand, especially if you're using smart bidding. Review past Black Friday search volume data. Sometimes we'll have clients say, well, what should our budgets be? Ideally unlimited. Right? You want to capture as much as you can on Black Friday. I understand some companies just can't do that. And so you have to go back and look, all right, what is search volume increases that we had last Black Friday, what for our popular products that we're going to be running deals on, what's the interest increase? So here I use Google Trends and I just put in LG Smart TV seems to be the theme for this guide. And you'll see that our interest jumps. They have it at a 50, pretty normal, and then all of a sudden it jumps up to 100 on Black Friday there. So I know in this example that I should probably be doubling my budget to capture the double of interest if I'm running promotions on my LG smart TVs. So I look at Google Trends, I look at historical data. A basic rule of thumb though, that I'll tell clients if we don't have good data to work off of or even this sort of interest data from Google Trends, I just say, listen, just double your budget, okay? If nothing else, just double your normal budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and capture what we know is going to be a massive increase in volume anyways. So you can go very strategic in the weeds and look at data to try to formulate. All right, these products we're going to, you know, these products are campaigns we're going to increase by X versus these products. If you want to just be simple about it, if you're just running a very simple account and you don't want to go through all the analysis of data, just double your budgets and you'll, you'll win the other thing. So a little pro tip here. Make sure to periodically check your budgets on Black Friday and on Cyber Monday. I know we want to be lazy on Black Friday. Your friends and family probably aren't working. However, this is the day to make a lot of money normally or at least get that increase in sales. So be periodically Checking the account and your budgets. If you're starting to get close to those budgets that you have on your campaigns and sales look good on the back end and everything's looking nice, start start increasing them further. Our team for our clients, I mean we're, we're like watching Black Friday and our client accounts like a hawk all day long because we know we can run into some of these scenarios where we misjudged the search volume increases on particular campaigns and now we're approaching budgets way too early in the day. So we start ramping those up if the results prove to to be good. So pro tip, just periodically be checking that throughout the day. Don't blindly go through Black Friday without checking your account. I've seen devastating results because people forget to just literally check the the account for that day then bidding. You have two options here. By the way. I have a full YouTube video breakdown on how to use seasonality adjustments which I'm going to talk about. I will have that in the description of this video as well. It's not inside of my guide here, but I will also have the video inside of this guide. I don't believe this video is out on YouTube yet, so we will have that too. But you have two options with bidding. You have use seasonality adjustments is what I recommend or you just lower your ROAS bids. So seasonality adjustments. Go watch my video training on that to get a better idea of how you should set that. In fact, I use Black Friday as an example in an account for that. If you're going to lower your ROAS bids because you're uncomfortable using seasonality adjustments or you know I I have some simpler accounts where I like just doing the lower row as bid strategy. It seems sometimes easier to control. I do prefer seasonality adjustments when you can do it and you're comfortable running it. But this lowering the ROAS bid strategy is a pretty good strategy as well. So what I do is small incremental decreases in my return on ad spend goals for my campaigns about one to two weeks before Black Friday. Two weeks might be a tad too long, but at least one week before Black Friday I am decreasing just about every day if not every other day. Small incremental decreases that just be very more like get more aggressive on my bidding, knowing Black Friday is about to really ramp up. So for example, if my my goal is a 3 or if I have a 300% troas bid strategy set right now and Black Friday comes and I know I need to be more aggressive and I'm Willing to chop that back, chop that down to a 200%, knowing I'm going to hit higher than a 200% just due to the fact conversion rates probably going to double or increase significantly. Then a week before Black Friday, I may go from 300 to 270. I like to chop it down in like 10:15 to 20:20 on the high increments. So I may go from 300 to 270 and then wait a day and then, you know, the next day go from 270 to maybe like a 250, 240, work my way then to a 200. And I want that 200 the day before Black Friday. I don't want my bids adjusted on Black Friday. I like to already be ramped up, ready to roll come midnight of Black Friday because when you start making some of those adjustments, I feel I don't have any data to back it up. But I sometimes don't like pinging in the system bid changes or anything. On actual Black Friday, I like to have my bids ready to roll right before Black Friday. So it's, it's already aggressive. Now your seasonality bid adjustment, that will be different on how that, the mechanics of that work. And that will usually launch on Black Friday depending on how you set the schedule. But again, go watch the video on that then. Other important settings. Auto rules. Okay, so this is where those ad labels are highly, highly important. You want normally, so you don't manually have to set this up. You want to go in and enable your Black Friday ads and pause out your legacy ads using auto rules in your account. I actually even built out some auto rules here for you in this guide. Let's hop in real quick. I just want to show you quickly how I would set up an auto rule inside of an account. Okay, so I'm inside of an account where I want to set these auto rules up for my Black Friday ads. You can get to the auto rule section several different ways. But I'm just going to go to tools and settings, bulk actions. Then you go to rules and then I'm just gonna hit click new rule and it's going to be an ad rule. So I'm in here. We'll call this Black Friday then. So you have your actions. You can add up to five. So action is going to be enable ads and then I'm going to apply that for this case, I can do it on the account level, it doesn't really matter. And then the condition though, you just type in label. And then for here I'm Tight. I have Black Friday already ready to roll, so I set it to Black Friday in ad status. Make sure you know, it's enabled and paused. That way it's because my Black Friday ads are currently paused, so I can't have this just to enabled ads. So I've seen that happen before. Then add new action. I want to pause ads and then in this one again, select account enabled, paused. You're going to go to label. And I have these labeled as legacy. So these are my current ads that I'm running right now with no Black Friday ad copy in them. Well, I want those paused out on Black Friday and my Black Friday ads running. So I will have enable and then pause. So that's all ready to go and set up. Then I want the frequency set to just once. That's going to be on November 24th at midnight. And then using data from all time that doesn't really matter. Email results. Yes. So I have. I'll probably block my email out here. But you put your email in there if it's in the account. That way, you know, it does run one thing here. So I sometimes will let my legacy ads run because Black Friday. So in this particular setup, I'm saying pause out all the legacy ads and then enable all my Black Friday ads at midnight of Black Friday. Right. And I don't really know because I'm probably not going to be awake unless you are. Then I'm not going to know if this successfully changed until I wake up in the morning. So a lot of times I will set the rule to just enable my Black Friday ads. I'll keep my legacy ads on because I know they're fine the day before, but this is why I don't have to be up at midnight to. To to make sure this runs correctly. Then when I wake up in the morning, I go through my accounts and then I go and pause my legacy ads. But that way, just in case your Black Friday ads have an issue or the rule has an issue, you at least have your legacy ad still running and you can manually check that in the morning. So that's just a pro tip there. Obviously in this example, it would pause them. I'm just showing you how you could set this up in one go. But I actually normally only will set, enable Black Friday, leave my legacy ads, and then manually go in and check that in the morning and then pause out my legacy ads. I wake up early on Black Friday. I have to, right. To make sure everything's running smoothly for our clients. So I'm up Ahead of most people who are already, you know, getting their credit cards out, ready to order. So I'm not late to that. I'm prepped for it. But I do put a little manual effort into this and not just rely on auto rules, but this is how you would set this all up in an auto rule. And sure enough, I hit preview. I'll have some of this blurred out, you know, to keep the client information confidential. But you can hit this preview tab and it will show you exactly what would happen on Black Friday at 12:00am Based on the rules that you set up. So it is loading and we will see. It's taking a little bit too long to load here, so let's see if this. There we go. So now the preview showed and yep, again, I'm gonna have all this kind of blurred out. So you probably won't see any of this. But I'm just looking at it. Everything looks fine. So I would save this rule. Right. Obviously this isn't a real case, so I'm going to cancel that. Okay. This is what you waited till the very end, I hope, for the most important setting of them all for Black Friday. And it's literally the easiest thing in the world. Make sure to have a backup billing option set up in your account. Worst case scenario is you have a billing issue and Google does not run your ads at all. I'm not kidding. This has happened in the past two accounts. I've heard this horror story from others as well. Literally go to your payment methods inside of your account and you'll see this little backup. You have your primary, usually a credit card. Then you can add a backup, add a backup. You have no idea what can happen the day before or at midnight for whatever reason that night. Somehow this credit card or Google has a hiccup and it does not accept that card anymore as a billing option. It's rare, right? The chances of it happening is very, very slim. But it has happened and it then murders that account because they get applied. Absolutely no sales from Black Friday. So that you had all of that work and prep for deals and everything else, and you got the account set up and literally it won't run because of a billing issue. Do not allow that to happen. Go in there and just add a backup card to the account just to be safe. That is literally the most important setting of them all. Okay, to summarize real quick, he's like, oh, that's so much. There's a lot going in there. So listen, if you want to keep this simple for the the very Keep it simple, stupid Black Friday and Cyber Monday set up. Then what would I recommend? I would recommend add Black Friday and Cyber Monday ad copy to your ads, add a promotion extension. If you're literally going to be running promotions, make sure to have your billing have that a backup card set up in there so you don't run into a billing issue where your account doesn't run at all. And just double your budgets then on your campaigns for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you just want to keep it simple, you don't want to go through the weeds of all of these settings. There you go. That's the keep it simple summary of how to at least, you know, get some maximum gains out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday if you stuck with me this long. First off, kudos and congratulations. I hope you found a lot of good value out of this. I hope you make a ton of money on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Subscribe if you haven't already, and I hope to see you on our future videos. Thanks.