Black Friday Strategies for Google Search & Shopping (Episode 535)

0:18Welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. Today I am your guest host. My name is Joey Bidner And we are going to be talking about Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Q4 sales season. And actually, I'm going to go into sales in general. I want to talk to you today about my methodology of how to approach a sale, what a sale is really for. You know, it's not just about driving more sales. I look at it a little bit differently for long-term growth of a business. So we're going to talk about that methodology and how it impacts the way you spend on Google Ads for a sale. And we're going to also discuss the nitty-gritty details of how to display the sale with all the different tools, remarketing, assets, the full gambit.

1:15And at the end of the show, I'm also going to answer a question from a listener. And this question is actually not sale related. It's lead gen. So completely separate topic. So this episode should have a little bit for everyone. And before I get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, I want to discuss our sponsor for a quick sec. That is Optio. So Optio is a management platform that's no longer just about managing your Google ads. You can observe and manage all of your marketing channels. So that's Meta, TikTok, even ChatGPT ads is coming in the pipeline to import to this system. so you can look at all of your data holistically and talk to your data and see things surface in terms of what's performing and what's not.

2:11And I want to actually share a quick use case on how I'm using Optio because full disclosure, everybody, even though I am a podcast guest host, I'm a full paying customer of Optio. You know, that's how much I like the platform. I pay with my hard-earned dollars to use the platform and I use it every day. So I want to talk to you quickly about how I used it the other day successfully. I have an account that has a lot of negative keyword lists. It's a long-standing account that's had a number of managers over the years and everybody had different methods of negative keywords and all these lists.

2:56And in order to clean them up a little bit, I first asked it, okay, look at all these lists and tell me what lists are applied to what campaigns and tell me if there's any conflicting keywords based off of my targets, which it did. and I was able to quickly say, okay, remove those keywords. Now I want you to apply all these lists to all my campaigns because some lists replied to some campaigns, others to other campaigns with no rhyme or reason. And I was able to do all that stuff through the platform, just quick negative keyword list hygiene. And this was helpful because in platform, you know, I was burning my eyes through the screen, just looking on all these lists and cross-referencing what campaign is what, I was just able to hop in the chat and talk to it like an assistant asking, what's going on?

3:54Fix it now. Push the changes. So give Optio a try. Listeners of the show get a free 28-day trial. If you go to the website, that's optio.com, hop in the chat window and mention that you heard about the show on the paid search podcast and unlock your free 28 day trial. Okay, so hopping in to the main topic of the show, sale season. Now, I first want to talk about how to approach spend during a sale because I feel this is where the most mistakes are made. I often see that people will scale spend at the time of the sale. Black Friday hits and spends will go up. And I want to talk about why we should stretch our spend that we've allocated for the sale to the time period before the actual sale begins.

4:55And that's because the whole point of a sale, in my opinion, is to use that discount, that carrot on the end of a stick, to close pending traffic. People who have come to your website and are still in that consideration phase, new customers who are maybe unsure of you, you use the sale to leverage them to make a purchase. So then they're in your pipeline as a new customer. And the only way to do that is to approach them before the time of purchase. We need to prime this pipeline of new customers before the sale. Because when Black Friday hits, there's no more consideration phase. That's when people are ready to make their purchase.

5:47you have lost your opportunity to warm them up to get them into consideration phase so we need to spend our our a portion of our budget a good portion before the sale before the sale we all know return on ad spend is not going to be good because everybody is waiting for the sale and you kind of have to bite that bullet you have to talk to your clients beforehand and be okay with return on ad spends not being great for a couple weeks. And we'll get into how long you should spend for in a minute. I've got a methodology on that. But the idea is spend early on cold traffic. You know, you're not remarketing yet.

6:35You're trying to get in front of people who don't know about you yet just for the click so they can see your site, get you in the consideration phase. then when black friday hits that's when you remarket the heck out of them and remind them hey we're here you saw us we have a big sale and then boom you get that new customer that you can then benefit from in the future from a customer lifetime perspective because every new customer i shouldn't say every new customer not every business but you know a good portion of your customers likely buy again in the future. Maybe it's 10 % or 20%. That's what we call customer lifetime value.

7:15And having a strategy that focuses on obtaining new customers is how you build a business long term. And we should see sales as a lever for new customers. And I'll tell you, if you don't prime this pipeline and you just spike spend on Black Friday, you're likely just going to re-engage a lot of existing customers. You're likely just going to close people who would have bought anyway who are already in your pipeline. And that's why I like to spend before the sale. And I will increase spend a little bit the time of sale because you do need to ramp up that remarketing and traffic is more expensive at the time of sale also.

8:00So you do need to bump it up a little bit but i always um spend a lot of that budget beforehand and i should also mention traffic is cheaper beforehand which is really good so how much to spend or i should say how far before the sale do you scale and this is based off something called a conversion lag or a conversion window. And it's how much time your customers take to consider your product and purchase. What's the amount of time on average it takes for somebody to click an ad, go through the nurturing process, and then make a purchase. And this is a metric you can see in Google Ads. If you go to your campaign dashboard and you open up your time window and you look at your conversions column, or even your conversion value column, sometimes your cost per conversion column, or your return ad spend column.

8:59When you look at the data, sometimes you'll see a little dotted line under the metric. Sometimes it will be at the campaign level, where the campaign conversions data will have a little dotted line, or it'll be sometimes at the account level, at the very bottom of that table. And if you hover over that data point, when it's got that dotted line, a new little window will appear. You don't need to click on it. You just need to hover over it and it will tell you your conversion lag. And it will say on average, your customers take about seven days or 14 days from first click to conversion. And what I will do is I will take this conversion lag window and multiply it by two.

9:45And that is how much time I will spend for at an elevated pace for Black Friday. And the reason why we do by two is if you're only to do the actual conversion lag, technically speaking, only on that first day are you including the click to the full statistically proven conversion lag, that click to fruition by the time of the sale. So I do two times that lag. So you get a full cycle of people that will go through that statistic conversion lag window for consideration. One more thing to consider as well is if you do have these dotted lines everywhere to hover over and see, it's important to look at, obviously the account level one but more importantly the campaign level ones because sometimes your brand campaign if you have one will kind of mislead this data because brand campaigns obviously uh will have a much lower conversion lag when someone you know someone clicks on your branded keyword the conversion lag for that will be very low it'll be like one day or two days.

11:03But then for your cold traffic campaigns, they could be two weeks. And then the account average will kind of take both those in consideration and it can greatly reduce what that number is artificially. So I always will kind of glance at all of my shopping campaigns, my search campaigns, non-branded ones. They will all be a little bit different, but I'll get a sense of them there, just like a visual average and just kind of ballpark it. And that's how I will determine my conversion lag window. Okay, now getting into the technical stuff. Displaying your sale. So typically there are two general methods, right?

11:42You offer a coupon, a discount code, or you do my favorite, compare at price. Now, in my experience, most store owners will by default go for discount code because it's a little bit easier. It's a little bit easier to do on the website end. You don't need to change your products. You don't need to make a special new rule. You just build a discount code. You put it on the banner. You apply it however you want. And, you know, boom, you're done. But I find it's less effective than Compare at Price, which is a setting. It's called Compare at Price in Shopify stores, but it's available in other stores as well, where you give the system your new price for that product.

12:30So every product will have the original price and then now the new sale price. And what this does, if you have a well-optimized product feed, is it will display that new price directly on your shopping ad or in your PMAX campaign on your shopping listings that surface. It will show the original price scratched out and the new price on the ad before somebody clicks. A discount code will not show that. A discount code, you need to go to Merchant Center and apply for the discount code, and then a promotion label will show on your ad, but it won't typically show in the same light. It won't show somebody the actual savings on the surface of the ad.

13:18and once the store is used to them they're very easy it's not like you have to go into every product and write this discount and it's something you can do en masse so i'm a huge proponent for using compare at price instead of promo codes okay getting into remarketing next now if you run a performance max campaign you're already going to be doing a lot of remarketing it it will already have built-in dynamic remarketing. It's assuming you have the right dynamic remarketing codes on your site, but it will take your product listings, hopefully, with your compare at price prices on them and show those to people who have been to your site already.

14:03But I still like to often have a dedicated remarketing campaign, not only for the purpose of reserving and allocating budget for remarketing, but I still like to also have static remarketing ads to show more direct messaging and not just having products follow people around with the sale price to actually have branding in there. And the way that I'm doing that nowadays is I'm using demand gen campaigns. So demand gen campaigns is probably you might already know, is a relatively new campaign type, which we have talked about extensively on the show. I've done a number of episodes on it. And unlike Performance Max, you can make a demand gen campaign specifically target an audience.

14:52Remember, Performance Max, you can't. There's no such thing as a remarketing-only Performance Max campaign. The audience you give it are gentle suggestions. But Demand Gen, you can stay focused on an audience being your all visitors your converters your best customers what however you want to make your audiences and it will stick to it just remember to turn off audience expansion when you set it up but in this campaign it's it's really great you can have all of your asset types in there you can have a product feed so you can push dynamic remarketing you can have static display ads where you can layer over branding on the image and it's no longer that arduous multi-format system with all those very specific formatting guides we used to have which you know 15 different sizes it's just your standard three you know a square image a landscape image a portrait image easy and you can load those with direct messaging on them and branding so you can get your branding out there and you can have video and all of these can have dedicated ad groups you can choose what channels you want them on specifically it's not like pmax where it's hitting everything you can choose to have it only on youtube or choose to have it only on display or gmail make sure you check the channels because it does kind of go far.

16:27You know, you have Gmail placements, you have the display network placements, you have discovery placements and YouTube, obviously within YouTube, you can specify it to only show on shorts or in feed or the controls are there. And that's why I like demand gen. So that's what I'm using for remarketing. Okay, moving on to some slightly more granular features for displaying your sales are assets. And by assets here, I mean, what were formerly known as extensions, right? These are the extra little pieces on your campaigns that you can add that help get specific points across. So I want to start with promotional assets.

17:14So promotional asset is basically a little addition to your search campaign that will talk about your sale and send somebody to a specific url on your site when they click it so i always like to tell my clients you know if they're if they're you're either going to put this sale data directly on the home page front and center in which case if you want you can just send people to the home page or sometimes you know websites will have a dedicated url for the sale. That gets a little bit more granular into the details of the sale. And if you have a lot of details of your sale, you're going to want one of those.

17:53And this is where you can put that URL if you want. But it's just a place where you can set the start date, the end date, the promotional details. You can say what the occasion is. That one's a no-brainer. Going beyond that, one thing I really like to add are headline assets. So if you have a structure with a lot of search campaigns. Switching out all your headlines can be a real pain in the butt when it comes to a sale. You have to go through and add a headline into your responsive ad for every headline at the time of sale. Then you need to remove them all. Even if you use Google Ads Editor, it's a pain.

18:36Google released a couple years ago headline and description assets that allow us to make one headline with a start and an end date, that's key, and apply it to any and all the campaigns you want. And the beautiful thing is it will serve in all the campaigns and like I said, start and end when you want. And you can even pin it if you want. So headlines and descriptions are a no-brainer. I always use them for my sales. Going beyond that, there's one more thing I want to mention, which is promotions in Merchant Center. So similar to promotional assets, you can layer in promotions in Merchant Center.

19:24But there's a caveat. You can only use a promotion in Merchant Center if you're using the coupon code. if you're doing compare at price there's no need or no ability to use the promotion label in merchant center your promotions are already by default on your ads and it's not a bad thing that you can't it's just like i said they're already there but if you run a promo via a promo code this is what you'll you'll want to do this and it the problem is it also takes a bit of time to approve. So you have to do it a couple days before and you have to say what your promo is, the start date, the end date, blah, blah, blah.

20:07And I find them messy because in my experience also, when you're scheduling it before, sometimes it will get disapproved because the approval process will say, we don't see your sale on the site. And it's because it's not yet. And I just get that from time to time. So I find promo promotions and merchant center to just be messy. And another reason why I like compare at price over promo codes. All right. So there is one more thing that I need to mention. And that is in regard to this new tool Google released called promotion mode. Now, if you haven't noticed, Google has been on a tear releasing what seems to be a new tool every other week because I mean, I'm convinced they're just using AI to program their platform.

20:59I've never seen so many changes in one year in all my time in Google ads. But anyways, I digress. But right before Q4, they released this new tool called promotion mode. And I want to talk about it because I am a little hesitant. Because when you look at promotion mode, it's touting it as this setting that that you should use when you have a sale because it will essentially give the system leeway to fluctuate your return on ad spend for scaling opportunity so it's saying oh if you need a 400 return ad spend how much are you willing for that to slide down in the name of getting more sales and more scale for this sale period now i have a bit of an issue with this because it's in contrast to a tool we used to use for something similar, which was seasonality adjustments.

21:57So I've spoken about seasonality adjustments in the past. And just to bring us up to speed on where we came from to talk about where we are now, seasonality adjustments are a tool that a lot of us practitioners have used to leverage for sales, but was specifically meant to be used for seasonal shifts. But it's a tool that you can use where you basically specify the dates of your sale and you're telling the algorithm, I am expecting a lift in my conversion rate. Which I thought was really great because that's what happens, right? Over a sale, your conversion rate goes up and it tells the system this is going to happen.

22:36So it allows it to more or less, you know, scales as it needs to and then cuts back when the sale's done. but you still keep your return on ad spends the same, your targets the same, but it just knows you're going to get a spike in conversions. This is different. This is saying, how much are you willing for your return on ad spend to drop so we can scale? Now, I've got a bit of a problem with saying I want less return on ad spend because during a sale, you kind of have a bit of a higher standard for your return on ad spend because you're eating away at less margin. You have less leeway to give up return on ad spend.

23:15So this is truly only an option if you really are focused on your cost to acquire a new customer. And new customers are your strategy. And you have a formula for how much return on ad spend you can forego to gain new customers. So if you're really sophisticated like that, okay, by all means, allow Google to ramp down your ROAS results in order for them to scale more. but I find this setting is a little bit of Google, again, trying to sign over the keys so they can scale. And I'll tell you one thing, I'm not against it because I haven't used it yet. This is me just speculating because it's brand new.

23:58But my advice is to test this on a less critical sale. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday is arguably the most important sale of the year. depending on where you live in the world. And I think that that is a way too risky of a time to try a new tool like this. You know, a lot of businesses rely on this time of the year to get through the winter because winter is, you know, let's say a down season. They rely on this. And I think it's way too risky to try something new. So I will be testing this, but I'm going to do it on a small sale in the middle of the year and see what the results are. I'm going to be holding off for now on testing promotion mode.

24:44And I should say also that promotion mode seems to be just like a little bit of a packaged, marketed version of another new tool called Smart Bidding Exploration, which is another tool you'll see in your campaign settings where it's saying the same thing. Oh, do you need to explore your traffic? how and it's a sliding scale of how much are you willing for your return on ad spend to drop so it's basically like okay in order to scale you no longer need to actually change your return ad spend you just go into your smart bidding exploration and tell it to give leeway to scale down your targets and your results here because as you know like we spoke about in a previous episode, Google has changed the rules of how we use target return on ad spend.

25:37They hold it very literally. So now instead of changing them at the actual campaign settings in your bidding, they're creating separate tools for you to adjust those to change the targets for you to scale. So that's all these are. These are, I see this promotion mode as just a repackaging of smart bidding exploration so they can get you to use it at the time of sale. But I will be testing this out at a less critical time. And the last thing I want to mention before going into the next segment of the show is how you should structure your sale. I get this question a lot of what should we do for the sale?

26:16And the first thing I want to say is don't do any little baby sales. You know, 10 % off is not a big enough carrot to entice that new customer to take action. if you're going to go for a sale go heavy go hard you know it's really competitive and you've got to do something that makes a difference otherwise you're not going to get those new customers and you're just going to be giving away margin without much gain so i say like 20 and up you know it's got to be heavy and don't do over complicated sales you know sometimes i see you know okay you get 10 % off if you do this, this, and that, and 15 % off if you do this and that, and 20 % off if you have this and that.

26:58And it confuses the customer. There's so much noise around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, that it's got to be straightforward. And your messaging in your display ads, for example, need to be straightforward. It's got to be just 20 % off, get it now kind of thing. I don't like overly complicated sales. So that's my biggest advice. Based off the old classic marketing concept they taught us in school, the KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid. So that's what I believe should be done for a sale. Okay, so before we get into the next segment of the show, I want to mention our sponsor one more time.

27:44That's Optio. head over to Optio to get your free trial for 28 days. Just mention that you got this tip from the paid search podcast. That's optio.com. And I will remind you once again that this is no longer just a Google ads tool. This is for all of your marketing channels to see and observe it in one place. Visit optio.com. All right. So I am going to read a question from a listener. And just a reminder, if you want to submit your question to be read out and answered on the show, just visit the paidsearchpodcast.com and send in an email. I forget the email that Chris has right now for the question and answer, but I'm sure he'll put it in the show notes so you can click that or visit the site to submit your question as they're always a lot of fun to read and discuss.

28:40All right, so I've got a question from Robert Gazzola. I hope I pronounced your name right. And before we get into his question, we got to mention a little bit of glazing we got going over here. Robert has given us a little bit of props that, of course, I have to read out. So he says, thanks again for your podcast. I've listened to and read many Google Ads podcasts, newsletters, and blogs, and I get by far the most out of your podcast, as I've been managing Google Ads for 20 years as well. So this is no beginner. And I find it very insightful. So thank you again. Wonderful to hear. Now I will give all of those kudos to Chris because he is the man and I am merely a guest in his arena.

29:23So Chris, well done. Okay, my question. So it's a little bit long, but I'm going to read it because it's well written and it gets through all the details. So for a good number of our service clients, such as plumbers, electricians, and HVAC businesses, they utilize third-party booking softwares that we have on their website. Book now, where once they click, they either go to another website or a pop-up appears. As we all know, once you leave the website and go to a third-party software, you lose the ability to track conversions with Google Ads, which is true, everyone. Though sometimes I know you can do an API integration, but that's not applicable in most of these instances.

30:09So the only way we can try to measure a conversion, in this case, is with a click, which doesn't give much insight and is lower quality. I see that we tend to generate a higher number of these conversions in PMACs campaigns as well, which again leads me to believe they are potentially lower quality. so in this case would you recommend still tracking a conversion click knowing we don't fully know if it's truly converted or would you make it secondary or primary conversion so this is a great question and yeah a problem i see all the time um you know somebody clicks on a booking calendar they go to calendly which because you can't put your tracking pixel on And Calendly, it cuts off this system to track the conversion.

31:02And I'll highlight one key point that he mentioned, which is really the linchpin in this problem. As he said, measuring through PMAX. Now, when it comes to a conversion measuring as just a button click, Like, PMAX is a ripe environment for bad actor websites to take advantage of that. Because there's no barrier to entry for a conversion, what can often happen is because PMAX, by default, allows the display network. There are websites out there that are crummy websites. You know, they're websites that just have googly gop on there, just bad news websites. And they have the Google display network on their site showing ads.

31:55And they'll have a bot click an ad and do whatever it can to generate a conversion. And when Google sees that conversion from that site, it says, oh, this is a good website. Let's send them more conversion, convertible traffic. and that's how these scammy sites make money. And when you have a conversion that just takes a click of a button and not like a detailed lead form, it's very easy for that little bot to generate a lot of these crummy leads. And that's why PMAX can sometimes generate poor leads for lead gen. I typically use PMAX only for e-com because you can't fake that funk. If that website really wants to buy your product and give you money, power to them though that never happens but because there's no skin in the game for them to generate a lead with a bot um you know it's it's it's a bit of a system that can break and i'll tell you one thing this isn't just a problem for for pmax campaigns with just that little click um to conversion they'll have bots that can fill out lead forms so you're not alone in this uh you know, poor quality situation from a PMAX campaign.

33:12Now I will say I have, I have had accounts where I also just did the click for a conversion, but I wouldn't use PMAX for it. I will just use it in the case of a search campaign. And if it gets out of hand, yeah, in that case, I will make it secondary. I won't let it run crazy. You know, I had an account actually recently, it was for a private school that we generate leads for their school tours and their applications process. And they had a button for them to email them. And when you email them, it opens up like Gmail and has like the email pre-populated and we can't track that. So one of the conversions was just a Gmail click.

33:59And we would always validate against the emails they get in to make sure they're good quality. And over time, and it literally switched overnight, like over the course of a couple months, they just went crazy. At one point they were fine and the emails they were getting were good. And then a couple of these sites picked up the fact that they could get these conversions easy and it went from like zero to a hundred and we made it secondary. So I would make it secondary if you can. Now, one other thing you can do is if you have multiple conversion actions on the site, you could use value-based conversions and value-based bidding, even in this lead gen scenario, to tell the system this conversion is worth less.

34:47So it's not taking it off the table completely. It's saying it's worth a lot less. And I'll tell you how I would do that is, let's say you still get some good leads from the system let's say you get one in ten versus another lead um generating uh conversion action on the site where it maybe gets one in two closed deals what i would do is i would use those ratios to add a value to the conversions So let's say you have a, I'm just going to use round numbers, a$400 customer lifetime value. And you have a 1 in 10 conversion action on this button click. I would set a value for that conversion action of 40.

35:36That's 400 divided by 10. Okay. Then your other conversion action, that's 1 and 2, 400 divided by 2, I would set that conversion value at 200. Now, those are pretty dramatic differences, but just to show you what you would do. And then you switch to target ROAS bidding or maximize conversion value, and your algorithm will take those into consideration. And, you know, the whole point of it is it will steer away from those just crazy loop conversion actions. Sorry, converting campaigns from that display scamming system, gravitate away from it and balance the scales a bit. So I think that's really your options is either turning it off, make it secondary or use value based bidding.

36:25all right everybody i hope this was a really helpful episode feel free to hop in the comment section if you're on youtube to go back and forth if you have any further questions on any of this stuff and submit a question to chris if you want one read out on the show i will see you next time