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Black Friday is around the corner. If you don’t have a strategy in place yet, get started now because one of the busiest days in the global online shopping calendar is now only a few weeks away.

In 2019, the UK total retail spending during Black Friday was £8.6 billion, the highest in Europe.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were predicted to be significantly lower in 2020 due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, but with an overall 39% of brits (against a whopping 42% the year before) spending on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the UK still saw an average spend of £295.67 during the busy shopping day.

The latest figures confirm the growing opportunity for ecommerce businesses to maximise their online sales with more and more consumers searching and shopping online.

The opportunity is there for Paid marketers to implement effective marketing strategies to help retailers sell more products with google shopping ads during this year's peak shopping season.

Black Friday is incredibly competitive for Paid shopping ads. All your competitors will be on guard, looking to offer the best deals and many will have a big budget already set to spend on Google shopping ads.

We’ve worked on thousands of Google shopping ads for Black Friday over the last 4 years, so we want to share some knowledge with these 5 top tips to help you ace your shopping ads, sell more products and boost your ROAS.

1.   Audit, assess and amend

At this stage, it’s time to look over the performance from Black Friday 2020, along with any other promotional periods you run this year, such as summer or mid-season sales. To understand where you’re (hopefully!) going, you should assess how customers have responded to your shopping ads in the past.

Look at past budgets, conversion rates, waste, sales, the route to customers finding your ads and the shopping ads that performed best, then find the opportunities to improve and do better this year.

Start by running a product feed audit. It’ll show you the number of products within your product feed that have generated sales over the last 30 days and highlight issues and areas to improve within your product feed before the big weekend!

2.   Research competitors

The weeks leading to Black Friday are great to get to grips with your competitor’s products and pricing.

Naturally, when it comes to Google shopping ads, pricing is key, and Black Friday is all about savings. Google’s algorithm favours shopping ads that show cheaper products by way of better placement, so having shopping ads that show lower prices in comparison to your competitors can boost your impressions, clicks and conversions.

Our Price Comparison tool allows retailers to see where their product price falls against other competitors. Once the tool has highlighted the price position on the market using the product GTINs, retailers can then decide whether to adjust their pricing accordingly or maintain their initial price range.  Get in touch if you want to know more about this feature. 

3.   Product feed optimisation best practices

Product titles, descriptions and images you use on your shopping ads all help attract clicks and potential customers. Don’t waste this valuable real estate. To get Black Friday shopping ads right, you’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse.

This means regularly assessing performance (you can do this by the hour within AdWords through an hour-by-day report) and optimising product feeds as you go, ensuring your product titles, images, stock availability and descriptions are always optimised and up-to-date. Why do we insist on feed optimisation? Because your product feeds are responsible for 100% of the search terms your Shopping Ads appear for.

Optimising product feeds takes time, so we’ve found a slicker and easier way of getting to grips with optimisation. At a busy time like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, why make life harder for yourself? 

4.   Use negative keywords

This can become a lengthy and laborious task – but it’s a very important one.

Using negative keywords as part of your campaign strategy is the best way to take control of the search terms that your products appear for. Negative keywords help filter out traffic that isn’t looking for what you’re offering.

Although negative keywords aren’t a requirement for shopping ads to be approved, they’re a great way to avoid spending budget on users that aren’t going to purchase, allowing you to put your resources into users who are likely to buy.

We recommend you keep track of your converting and non-converting search terms, so you can promptly add those non-converting terms to your negative keywords list.

5.   Track performance and cut budget waste

Monitor shopping ads performance during the Black Friday sales period to ensure that you minimise budget waste. Before Black Friday, keep an eye on your search term query report to monitor how users are coming to you and how your budget is being spent on the shopping ads. As mentioned before, look at the terms that aren’t converting and get those added as negative keywords.

It’s also worth monitoring your disapproved products (we highly recommend making this a priority in the weeks leading up to Black Friday). If the volume is high, focus on your most competitive or expensive products, so that you’re not losing out on that valuable traffic.

Get in touch for more information about product feed optimisation and Google CSS and how we can help you sell more this Black Friday.