Black Friday has always been closely associated with some kind of a ‘mad rush’.
In its strange evolution over the past decade, that mad rush seems now to have fully transferred from the heaving aisles of Walmart, to the Slack channels of advertising agencies.
But as we prepare to go once more into the breach, let’s take a moment to look at what we can expect from ‘BFCM’ this year, and how to extract maximum value out of it.
Q4 is the new Friday
But this year - the peak is shorter
It’s easy for us here in Europe to forget that Black Friday is a feature of a distinctly American calendar, and governed by the cadence of Thanksgiving (the fourth Thursday of November).
With Thanksgiving falling late in November this year, so too does Black Friday. This shortens the window between ‘Cyber Weekend’ and Christmas by five days vs 2023.
We can expect this condensed window to intensify the usual BFCM spike as consumers feel more urgency to wrap up their holiday purchases.
So plan for heightened competition – and likely a record spike in activity – within this compressed timeframe.
Platform Updates and tips for Peak Season
Scheduling Changes to Messaging
If your peak season involves multiple rounds of different promotions, two newish features could streamline your process:
1. Campaign-level Headline and Description Assets. Add new text lines to existing ads in bulk – either complementing current lines or replacing them through pinning. These lines can be scheduled, giving you the flexibility to adjust messaging in advance, and without creating new ads. Plus, the asset-level reporting allows insight into how specific lines perform (a valuable addition, as RSA reporting typically lacks this detail).
2. Scheduled Posting in Google Ads Editor. We can now schedule posting of changes in Google Ads Editor at a time or date of our choosing. Not only is this useful for fully completing the work on a round of changes without requiring a following action to implement them – it also helps to guard against the all-too-common issue of ads being disapproved when posted (even on pause) in advance of their URL being set live.
PMax / Shopping Priority Change
Google’s new prioritisation means that Ad Rank now decides which campaign serves ads where both PMax and Shopping campaigns promote the same products – doing away with the blanket priority previously granted to PMax.
While this gives advertisers more freedom to control spend distribution, there is already turbulence from this update, with Shopping campaigns seeing the expected rise in clicks and spend where they had been suppressed by PMax. Take care to be aware of those changing patterns before the big Black Friday push.
If you exclude brand terms in PMax while using Shopping for branded queries, note that you can no longer rely on PMax taking priority within the non-brand element of your shopping activity. Look out for this and make any necessary adjustments to preserve (or adapt) your setup.
Seasonality Bid Adjustments
Peak season is the classic use case for SBAs. Don’t forget that this feature now has two components:
1 The classic adjustment to ‘estimated conversion rate’ (a rare opportunity to take a spanner into the algorithmic black box!)
2 The newer ‘budget’ adjustment, which allows scheduled changes to the budget of one or multiple campaigns. Unlike automated rules, these allow both a start and end time to be set in one go. Another nice time saver.
The Hare and the Tortoise
Finally, with all the talk around when and how to engage with peak season, there is still a very valid question for many advertisers as to whether to do so.
For some industries, jumping in at the season’s height may be opening the door to more cost than benefit. Better in these cases to ignore the hype, and avoid the intense competition and inflated costs that Black Friday brings.
For these brands, targeting shoppers in the post-season lull, when consumers are more selective and advertising costs generally more favourable, is the more strategic – and profitable – choice.
