Cyber Monday is one of the biggest days of sales for online retailers. Therefore it is critical to ensure that your PPC account is fine tuned to take full advantage of all the extra online traffic and this extra traffic being more inclined to buy on that day. Here are my top tips to make sure you do.
Budgets
- As the graph below shows Cyber Monday is the peak search period for most online retailers so make sure that your top performing keywords and campaigns have a high enough daily budget to allow for the significant swell in searches. Realising the week after that your impression share was only 30% for keywords that have a 6% eCommerce rate is a pretty hard pill to swallow.
Image source: Google Internal Data - If you haven’t managed to gain extra budget for this time period, and your campaigns and/or account regularly gets to the daily budget cap it may be worth considering reallocating your budget for the day. Transfer some of your budget from averagely performing keywords to the top performing keywords to get your impressions share high on those top revenue driving keywords.
Ad schedule
Conversion trends tend to go slightly out of the window on big sales days such as Cyber Monday so take the time to look at your website’s hourly conversion performance last year as you may find different trends; were customers searching and buying for those deals earlier in the day than usual? Were customers buying more products after 10pm than usual? Once you have answered these questions you may find you need to tweak your ad scheduling.
Ad copy
An obvious one, but a task well worth doing in advance, especially if you are using price or offer led ad copy to ensure it all gets approved and scheduled to run first thing on Cyber Monday, there is no worse feeling than missing sales due to disapproved ad copy.
Bids
It’s highly likely that your competitors will also be looking to take their share of the action, so be prepared for the possibility that the average CPC for your keywords and campaigns may fluctuate during the day. Monitor your average position and CTR closely over the course of the day and react as required to ensure you are not losing clicks to competitors.
Keywords
As ever with paid search, the keywords you bid on are fundamental to your success. As user intent is changing on Cyber Monday it doesn’t take a huge amount of thought to suppose that users search queries will also change and not realising this may result in you missing some opportunities. If you were running paid search last year look at your search query reports from Cyber Monday or use keyword tools to ensure that you’re covering all the keywords that may be searched.
Ad Extensions
If your website is forward thinking enough to have a Cyber Monday landing page use site links (especially on brand terms) to build awareness of the upcoming deals you have available to drive extra brand traffic.
Products
If you are reading this blog then you are more than likely to be an eCommerce website and largely speaking your marketing will be product based. It’s another simple one but it is a useful exercise to double check you know exactly what is being promoted and whether your competitors are pricing you out of sales with their discounts.
If Product A is not on your Cyber Monday sales list but Competitor A is offering a 30% discount on the same product then it may be prudent to consider pausing your keywords based on this product given you are 30% more expensive.
In summary, focus your PPC budget on the products you are price competitive for. In my (personal) experience brand loyalty tends to get thrown out of the window on sale days….
Start early
Your Google Account Manager has probably already told you this one, however, it really is worth starting your Cyber Monday campaigns a day or two early. For one, users can search a few days in advance to get to know where the best deals will be and if you are not visible on the seasonal keywords during this time you may be losing potential customers. Secondly starting early will give a boost to your quality score and help your ads be in higher positions in the SERPs for lower CPCs.
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