Black Friday & Cyber Monday Google Ads Masterclass 2024

We generated over 1 million in sales last Black Friday and Cyber Monday for our client portfolio. I am going to give you the complete breakdown of what you should be looking at in your Google Ads account and prepping for so you can make the most amount of money on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. Also, I've got the number one thing you should be looking at that if you don't, I have seen accounts make zero sales on Black Friday because. Because they missed this one setting. So I have that in there as well. Let's dive in. Okay. Number one, look at last year. So if you were running ads last year, go analyze that data. It is going to help you prep for what you could expect this year Won't be perfect, but it will give you an idea of what to look at. So are there any learnings from last year? Did you have sales that did better than others? What were your competitors doing last year that might have beat you versus what you guys were trying to do? So go review actual learnings from last year to help prep what you're going to do. Then I want to show you did you lose out on impression share due to budget? I'm going to actually show you a real account where I look at that and I want you to look at did competitors increase and if so, which competitors increased last year. This will give you an idea of what the competitive landscape could potentially look like this year. Again, some of these competitors might not do what they did last year, but this gives us a bullseye of who we should be looking at as well during what is most likely some of the highest sales volume days for your store. So let me dive into an account. I want to show you this data. Okay. I'm in a real account. This is in report editor and what I'm looking at is last year's data a few weeks up until Black Friday and Cyber Monday. And what I like to look at is just what's the, what's the data show? What are the days like before Black Friday? And you know, what does Black Friday look like for us too? So I'm looking at, you know, what's our average conversion rate increase? You'll see we went from about a 2 to a 3.19. We did see about a double in conversion value, which is nice. And then our ROAS was around our historical average here at an 8.5. However, the number one thing I look at actually is a metric called search lost Impression share budget. What this is saying is and I'll actually just pull the real thing up it estimates how often your ad didn't show on Google search sites due to low budget. So this is just saying, hey, you lost out on impressions because you, you were capped by budget. I on Black Friday do not want that at all. And so in this case, I'll round this up. We did lose one due to budget last Black Friday. We didn't lose anything on Cyber Monday due to budget. If I were consulting with a client and I was looking at this data for Black Friday last year, let's say this, this was, you know, 20% I would say, guys, you've got a big problem. Your results were really good, especially if you prepped your account like I'm teaching you in this video. You should be fine. Don't let budgets cap you out on your biggest day. The reason that happens is a lot of people just get a little nervous and they set too conservative of budgets and they're lazy and they're, you know, actually not working on Black Friday. So they're not even checking what their spend levels are throughout the day. Why? Because we're lazy. I go into budget in a little more detail later on in this video, but make sure go back to last year. Check some data. What did Black Friday and Cyber Monday look like for you know, conversion volume? Your conversion rate increases your return on ad spend. And then also look at at what was your percent lost of in search impression share due to budget. If you have a high number there, you've got a real big problem from last year but a real big opportunity for this year. Knowing, hey, proper budget allocation, making sure we're not getting capped out because we are going to be hitting our goals, especially on high converting days like Black Friday. We should not be capping ourselves. There lots of revenue then to be generated just by looking at if you're getting hit by this budget. Okay, then one of the things I look at too is competitors. So in this account there's lots of competitors, right? All this will be blurred out. I can't give you this information, but I did find one. Right. So this is, this is kind of pre Black Friday. This is shopping auction insights. Report here and you'll notice and again some of this is, this is going to be blurred out. So I don't show you who this is. But you'll notice a massive uptick in their impression share. So they went from under 40% to right around before. So they must have been doing like pre deals or they're ramping up their account to just maximize on Black Friday itself. But you'll notice Huge, huge search impression, share lift. So they, they went hard and got very aggressive here during this Black Friday period. Now they dip back down and then a tad left on Cyber Monday, but they really went after Black Friday here. What does this tell me? Not a whole lot other than this is a very aggressive competitor from last year. So I'm going back and I'm reviewing as much as I can on that competitor. I'm also looking at that competitor today. So my, I have a bullseye on them. Right. Got my eye on you. They're the number one competitor from last year to this specific client. So I'm keeping a very close eye out on them. We've got lots and lots of competitors but the data showed this is the, the most aggressive. This is the number one competitor I should keep an eye out on. And so I'm just checking. We're looking at their website. We're, we're making sure we're kind of spying on them. We what do they have planned? We're on their email list, right. We're seeing what kind of potential pre sales they're going to be running, etc. So you don't need to do that with all of the competition. But if you've got like a heavy hitter like we do in this case, put a bullseye on them, do some extra legwork to make sure you understand what they potentially are going to be doing this Black Friday that could impact you. All right, your offer. If you haven't come up with offers yet, now is the time to actually take a look at what you want to offer. If it is small, like I've talked to clients and they're like, well, we really don't want to run big deals. However, we'll throw like a 10% off out there. I usually recommend in that case don't run a deal at all. Just you're going to get sales anyways. But 10% is not going to move the needle. You will not be competitive. So what we have found or have seen in some data and you really need to be around 20 to 30% off, that seems to be kind of the competitive deal range to be at. Obviously there's lots of other deals you could offer, but if you're doing a percent off, that's kind of the range you should be looking at. There is a, another agency I have, I don't know them personally. I just really like this analysis they did. It's called, the agency's called Common Thread. So if you go To Common Thread Co.com, you'll be able to find this blog post. They did an analysis on 700e commerce holiday campaigns. This was back, I guess in 2023. This is a great resource to take a look at. Lots and lots of data here. But they show you sort of holiday offers and deal structures from those 700e commerce brands that they took a look at. So if you don't know what you want to offer or you want to kind of see what some averages are within, you know, some e commerce companies, at least 700 of them, this is a good analysis done by comments, right? So go check that out. Just remember, if you're not going to do a competitive offer, don't do an offer at all. All right. Actually getting inside of doing ad changes, number one is going to be ad copy. So consider testing phrases like Black Friday sale, Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals, best of Black Friday, et cetera, et cetera in your actual ad copy. So here's like an example of Stove Black Friday. But you'll see people are running Black Friday Cyber Monday sale copy in their ads. So you are going to want to actually prep and plan different ad copy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now, I talk about using rules later on on how to control that in an automated manner, but I would have your ad copy ready weeks before you would actually hit Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That way it's ready to go in the account and very, very easy to turn on. Don't, don't get to Black Friday and then start adding Black Friday ad copy. I've actually seen that done. Do not do that. Have your ad copy ready to roll, pause them out and then that leads us to add labels. So this is a very easy way of controlling this. So make sure to label your old ads. I usually use legacy or evergreen as the label and then label Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads. So this will come in handy when using auto rules to enable and pause out those. So Black Friday comes, you want Black Friday ads on, Black Friday's done, You want Black Friday ads off, and then Cyber Monday ads come on Cyber Monday same thing. Now, you still kind of want to manually review that process, but using labels will help tremendously because you can set rules and then you can just make sure all those rules ran on those labels. So let me show you inside of a real account, real quick on how to set this ad label up. Okay, so I'm in an actual account. I'm at the ad level of an ad group here. This will most likely be blurred out, but right now I've got this ad running, right? This is a generic ad. And again, most of the text and stuff will be blurred out, but all you do is you click that ad, you hit this label button up here and. And this I'm going to want to set to legacy ads, right? So I'm going to hit apply to that. This is now a legacy ad. Now if I had a Black Friday ad and I'm just going to go down to this paused one. This was actually a Black Friday ad I think ran in the past. But here I would label this now Black Friday ads or whatever your naming convention you want to do. So just add something that makes make sure that you know or whoever's managing the account knows this is Black Friday ads only now it will be way easier, especially if you have a large account. So let's say you've got, you know, lots of different ad groups, lots of different campaigns. It's manually doing this is a nightmare. However, now you know, these were the ads that were running before the sales. And then this is the Black Friday or these are the Black Friday ads that I want. And you can actually then filtered just by these labels, it makes it like a hundred times easier to manage. Okay, then you're going to want to add promotion assets. Now I have an entire video on every asset you could ever add into the campaigns themselves. So I will have that video in the description below. But promotion assets will actually show if you're running a promotion. Now this will be your. Your text ads, right? So here's an example of a Black Friday promotion showing up on an ad. It is an extens of the ad. So make sure if you're running promos at a certain level for an account or a campaign or ad group level, depending on where you're at, add those promotion assets in there. Again, I have an entire video on all assets, but promotion assets will be a part of that. So go ahead and take a look at that. Also, if you search for this Google Doc promotion asset requirements, there's some information here you can't get like clickbaity. Some people will try to get like clickbaity with their titles of promos and things like that. You want to stay away from all of that. It's pretty standard on the promotion assets. But just make sure you're adding those promotion assets for the promos you're running. Same thing with sitelink assets. So you're going to want to create specific Black Friday and Cyber Monday assets where it makes sense. So here's an example. Running buy one get one free iPhones Black Friday deals 50% off LG TVs. So if you're running specific deals on categories, go make sitelink extensions or assets for those. They really pop. Then when you're running your sale on Black Friday or Cyber Monday again in the asset video that I have below, I do review site links as well and then also price assets. So if you're running any sort of price promotions, then add these in. These are these take up a lot of real estate too when Google decides to show them with price Assets. Be careful with these. You can't try to add any promotional text to the headers or descriptions. Don't try to get salesy with this. So you can't add like Black Friday sale or LG TVs on sale. You just go in, add your pricing your sales price there. Google has a policy page here in regards to what you can and cannot do for adding your price assets. So make sure to take a look at that. This notion doc will be available to you guys so you can. You'll be able to hop in there and take a look. So make sure this is Price assets is one that seems to get forgotten a lot of times when people are doing prep work for Black Friday deals. Make sure see if you have areas with your promotions that you can be adding in price assets. Shopping Ads Check your feed. Make sure you have an optimized shopping feed. This will go a long way. I have an entire video on how to optimize the shopping feed now do not do this a few days before Black Friday. Just forget about it. Don't even touch it. However, if you're watching this video now and you've got plenty of time, then start reviewing this type of stuff. But try not to make any major changes, especially like fee changes too close to Black Friday. So now would be a good time if you're watching this video as I launch it probably first week of November here. But aside from that, try not to touch your feed too much. Use this then as a framework for next year's Black Friday. But if you have a bad quality feed, you want to fix that now. Better feed will help you win in the auctions, especially during very competitive big sales days like Black Friday. So if you want to learn more, check the video out on how to optimize feeds. That will be in the description below. Okay, Check for errors, right? So actually go into merchant center and make sure there's no product error. So inside a merchant center all you do is you go to products and then you look at the diagnostics or product Status area and you'll be able to determine do we have approval issues or products that are being limited for specific attributes that are missing. It's going to look like this when you log into this is like right at the main overview page of your merchant center account. Go to this product status side. Make sure you don't have any major feed issues going on or disapproved products, especially some of your top sellers or top selling categories. Inside of Merchant center you're going to also want to set up any promotions in there. So inside of Merchant center you're going to go to marketing and then you're going to go down to the left side here of promotions and then you'll just go hit add promotion there. You'll be able to create your promotion that you'll be running for a specific set of products. Or if you're doing like site wide promos, make sure though you do that. It's highly important because this will increase your click through rate. So this is what these little icons that pop up on the shopping ads themselves like sale. If you're doing a percent off, a lot of times you'll see like the actual number, let's say you're doing 20% off. Sometimes you'll see it show 20% off on the product ad itself. You also get the nice green sale price that pops up in the slash of your normal retail price there. This helps big time on click through rate. So if you're running promos, make sure you're actually adding those inside your Merchant center account. That way you're going to get the icons that pop up which will increase your click through rate. Okay, keywords. So you can actually depending on your industry target Black Friday and Cyber Monday specific keywords. So here's an example of LG TV Black Friday. This actually gets pretty good monthly search volume here. Obviously this is only going to pop up during a certain time. Like the search volume for this is really only going to be a little bit October, huge in November obviously due to Black Friday. So you've got a tight window there. But if you do some keyword research and find that your product categories or products themselves do get volume for people specifically looking for like LGTV plus the keyword Black Friday, then add those keywords in. A lot of people forget to do that. So you're going to want to do some keyword research on this. By the way, I have a video on keyword research that will be in the description below and how to do it properly. So make sure you do that. The Research first. Some of these keywords will be low volume, so they won't trigger anything. But if you're in a high volume category like TVs or something, and people are specifically looking for Black Friday deals in their searches, go target those keywords, add them to your campaigns and ad groups that you have for those products that you have sales on. Okay, competitor keywords. This is something. If you know you're going to have a more aggressive sales strategy potentially than some of your competitors, this is actually a really good time to try to target your competitors. I normally don't run a lot of competitor campaigns. It really depends client to client. Most of the time though, when clients come to me, I do not recommend starting with targeting competitor keywords. Usually that's like a tactic way down the road when you have like a really nice, optimized, matured account and you're, now you're just, you're, you're testing more complicated stuff like trying to go after competitor terms. However, when Black Friday comes, Cyber Monday, if you know that you're going to have an aggressive sale that might be more aggressive than what your competitor is offering, set up a competitor campaign. So a specific campaign targeting your competitor keywords. So in this case, if you look at Casper Mattress, you're seeing Nectar Sleep has a deal going. Look at this. So Casper Mattress has just a standard ad here. This obviously isn't Black Friday specific, but here Nectar, Nectar Mattress ad is better than this competitor and Casper, they're running a, from $400 biggest offer ever. So this, this ad captures my attention right away. Now if this is Black Friday specific, then let's say Casper is just like, hey, we Black Friday sale going on now or like maybe 20% off. And then Nectar comes in like we're running 50% off. This then is a great opportunity for Nectar to go target Casper in that scenario. Don't do it. If you don't. If you. Again, if you're not going to run like super aggressive deals, but it's probably not worth doing. But if you know you've got an aggressive deal and you potentially will have better deals than some of your competitors, it's worth setting this up and testing. You've got to do some of that research beforehand because you've got basically one or two days, you know, Black Friday Cyber Monday to really see if it works or not. So if it doesn't work, then you're going to spend money on it. And if you have a worse deal than what your competitors offering, you're, you're out of luck. So if you do run it, also make sure that morning do some testing on those competitors, see what their offers are, and if they're better than yours, shut those ads off. Don't let them run all day on Black Friday and waste your budget then. Okay. Campaign structures. Now normally if you're running like site wide deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or even if it's specific products, but you've got a lot of different deals going across the board, I do not recommend segmenting your products out. It's just way easier to manage. You're still going to get a lot of rate opportunity within the ad auctions, just keeping your current campaign structures as is and doing all the other stuff I'm teaching you, right? Ad copy, ad promotions, etc. However, if you have just a specific maybe brand or maybe a dedicated product category that you're running super aggressive promos on and you really want to go hard on those specific brands or products, then it might be worth segmenting those out into their own campaigns where you blitz them on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Don't do this if you don't have to. This is like very unique cases. I prefer to just keep everything as is. You're going to still do well on Black Friday and Cyber Monday without needing to do restructures. But if you've got a unique situation where you're really blitzing a category or a brand, then think about actually segmenting those out into their own campaigns. All right. Budgets. This is big. Earlier in this video I talked about, you know, checking if you lost any search impression share due to budgets. You do not want to run out of budget on Black Friday. If you have your campaign set up correctly and they're optimized already and you got your bidding in place, you're going to mint money. Right? So don't cap that by having these budget caps on your campaigns. So you're going to want to normally start increasing your budget slowly up to one week before Black Friday. I prefer doing that versus operating like as usual and then doing a massive increase on Black Friday. So a week before Black Friday, I like to incrementally start increasing it. Sure. Do you, do you get maybe some inefficiencies on a few of those days before Black Friday? Yes. I don't care. That's how I like operating it. Knowing I'm really maximizing out on Black Friday. I just prefer doing that versus taking maybe a budget from 100 to $500 on Black Friday all at once. I just kind of like to let it grow. Also, if you remember in the beginning of the video I was going through pre Black Friday numbers before Black Friday in regards to conversion rates and all of that. Usually, especially if you're running pre sales for Black Friday, you're going to get some upticks there on some of those days leading up to Black Friday. So some of this budget uptick really helps there as well. So I prefer to incrementally start slowly increasing up until Black Friday. You can do one big change all at once. Normally I don't recommend that. Also, you're going to want to check trends look at LG Smart TV interest over time it obviously explodes more than double at least for for Google Trends here from here's October it's like a 50 and it shoots up to 100. So this is the MA. I mean it like it definitely more than doubles for LG Smart TVs on Black Friday. Cyber Monday's pretty big tube. Obviously Black Friday is the the biggest peak there for this specific term. Check Google trends for your product brands and product types. Know that there's going to be a huge uptick. Now I don't think you have to get too scientific here. Normally what I'm telling clients is two to three extra budgets minimum. Just go in two to three even if you like. If you have no time to do the research here, go 2 to 3x your budgets and on Black Friday make sure you're monitoring your actual account. Monitor those budgets. If it's 2pm on Black Friday and you already noticed like oh, some of these budgets are already approaching my caps, start increasing them. You do not want to lose money because you had a budget cap in place. Especially if your budgets are set up correctly and your bidding set up correctly. Do not let it cap out on budget. Okay, so bidding, you've got two options. One, you can use seasonality adjustments. I actually have an entire video on how to set this up correctly. The way Google tells you how to do it isn't really how I like to look at it and do it. So in this video with Google seasonality adjustments it will be in the description below. I walk you through how to how to look at this and how to set this up. You can use seasonality adjustments and let Google know your conversion rates are about to skyrocket on Black Friday on Cyber Monday and so you can ping to the algorithm beforehand. Be prepared. This is about to happen. Or you can lower your ROAS bids leading up to Black Friday. Or if you're super aggressive, you can actually kind of do a combination of both. I tend to do seasonality bid adjustments, but I also, depending on the client, I will actually start lowering my row as bid target a little bit. I'm just giving more breathing room to the, to this marketing. So, for example, if I had a 300% return on ad spend goal the week before Black Friday, I actually might start dropping that. Now, I don't, I'm not going to do it every day, but I may just start slowly going down to like from 300, I might drop it to like 290. And then a couple days before Black Friday, I might even drop it to like a 280 or 270. Why am I doing that? Because you're like, well, why would you do that if you're trying to hit a 300? If I don't have an aggressive seasonality adjustment on there, I am just kind of opening up the floodgates a little bit to the smart bidding to go get aggressive. And it usually will. Based off of my test, you're going to actually get a little more than if you left it at just let's say you had it set at 300 and was already hitting 300 for you. You're just kind of pinging to the algorithm. Go get aggressive. You're opening it up a little bit. And because conversion rates are about to go up for you in Black Friday, usually if you go aggressive on your bidding before Black Friday and then on Black Friday, you're going to actually capture more revenue and return than what you had it set to. Don't go too crazy. Don't go from like 300 to 150 roas or something crazy that would hurt you. But going down a little bit like, like 300 down to like 290, 280. A few days before Black Friday or that week leading up to Black Friday will be fine. And you're going to get more aggressive. Normally, again, you end up with a higher return on ad spend than what it's set to. Naturally, because the conversion rates are going to be so high on Black Friday. But check out seasonality adjustments. This can be used as well. Again, I kind of use a combination of both, but seasonality adjustments, a lot of people screw this up. So go watch that video on how to set it up correctly. All right, Auto rules. So remember earlier in the video I talked about adding an ad label for legacy ads? So the ads you were running before Black Friday and then Black Friday ads or Cyber Monday ads, adding labels to those, it makes it easier to manage. The pause and Enable of those ads during the sale times. Right? Well you can do this with rules. So you can enable Black Friday ads and pause out legacy ads using Google Ad rules. I actually have the rules in this sheet which you'll have access to. Right. This notion doc. I'm going to hop in an account real quick and just show you how to set this up real quick. Okay, I'm in a real account. I am going to tools bulk actions rules and then I'm going to hit this new rule icon here and we are going to do ad rules, right? So now I'm going to name this. We'll just call this Black Friday ads enabled. Then I'm going to hit apply to ads in the selected accounts and then I'm going to want to hit enable and you're going to want to set a condition to this. Right? So we want label to contain Black Friday ads. So now I'm saying as a rule for the entire account, anything that's labeled Black Friday ads who had like has this ad label, we want to enable these ads. Then I'm going to do it one time and I'm going to do it on actual Black Friday this year, which is I believe the 29th. And I'm going to set that to launch right at 12am as long as my deals are starting to go there. This is eastern time. And then you can also get my, my email address and stuff's going to obviously be blurred out here. But you can get an email as well when this goes on. So if you just want, hey, every time this rule runs that way when you wake up in the morning you can get an email of making sure all these rules did run. So you would hit save and boom. But I'm going to hit preview. So this preview would show obviously I just in this account have one ad that I did today on this video. It would say approximately one ad would change if you would run this rule now. And basically it's saying this ad would actually get fired, right? It would in it would be enabled so that you can have set up so that way auto enables those Black Friday ads. Then what you can do is hit let's say we were to add another one called legacy ads pause because you don't want those ads paused sometimes to be cautious, especially at 12am right when, when this is firing, I will keep the legacy ads on fire. My Black Friday ads then when I usually on Black Friday, you know I'm up early, right? To to make sure all of this is I got to beat the crowd. So I got to make sure all the ads for things are running correctly. So on Black Friday I'm up. Then I'll go in, make sure the Black Friday ads fired correctly. Then I'll hit pause on my legacy ads or run that rule if you want, but I like to make sure I'm checking this beforehand. However, if you want to run this just by a rule legacy ad pause, you're just doing the same thing. Except now you're taking any ad label that says Black Friday and you're just moving that to legacy. So I'm going to add that here. Boom. And now we want, instead of enable, we want pause. And so now legacy ads. If I, if I ran this rule, legacy ads would pause at at 12am on Black Friday and Black Friday ads would be enabled at 12am on Black Friday. That is how you automate this process and that's why those ad labels are very important. Again, make sure you're checking all of this manually though. Don't just rely fully on auto rules. Go into your accounts on Black Friday morning and make sure everything's set up correctly. I have seen people rely on auto rules and and they broke something in the setup and never ran Black Friday ads. So avoid that. The most important setting of them all is actually has nothing to do with Black Friday specifically. It has everything to do though with your billing. So make sure you have a backup billing option set up in your account. The worst case scenario is you have a billing issue and your ads don't even run on Black Friday. It is rare, however, I have seen it happen. So make sure you check your billing details in your account. Make sure you have a backup in there along with your primary. A lot of accounts today have had to move to using bank account as payment. Google took the credit card option away. If you're one of those accounts that you still can use credit card, make sure you have a backup credit card in your account or your bank accounts connected to as a backup. If something happens to that credit card on Black Friday or even the day before and you don't catch it, you ultimately could run zero ads on Black Friday. You don't want it. Again, extremely rare. I've seen it happen. It's the most important setting of them all. If you did nothing and you just made sure your ads are on on Black Friday, you're still going to generate sales. This is the worst thing that could happen though is your ads turn off because you don't. You have a billing issue. So make sure you check the billing in your account. There you go. You are Black Friday and Cyber Monday ready with all of these recommendations I've given you. I hope you make lots of money this year and I will see you on the next video.