Preparation:
- Increase Audience Reach: Boost your acquisition campaigns to expand your audience ahead of Black Friday.
- Secure Materials in Advance: Ensure all necessary materials are ready; coordinate with suppliers and be prepared for last-minute changes.
- Assess Offer Viability: Evaluate the sensibility of your company’s Black Friday offers; ensure they match customer expectations.
- Estimate Costs and Revenue: Create a daily budget estimation based on past Black Friday performance to align expectations with your company.
- Budget Increase: Allocate extra budget for your Black Friday campaigns to accommodate increased activity.
Before Launch:
- Card Limits Check: Review and increase daily, weekly, and monthly credit card limits to avoid any unexpected issues.
- Backup Payment Method: Add an alternative payment method to your account in case the primary one encounters problems.
- Adjust Facebook Account Limits: Verify and raise all account limits on Facebook if necessary; coordinate changes with your company.
- Set Black Friday Communication Plan: Plan and share the communication strategy with your team, outlining how and where you’ll engage with customers.
- Emergency Contact: Establish a contact person within your company who can address any issues promptly.
- System Alerts: Configure system alerts for email notifications on rejected products, low data reports, or zero impressions.
- Budget Review: Double-check all budgets to avoid accidental overruns.
During Campaign:
- Monitor Price Changes: Keep an eye on any price adjustments in your product feed during the campaign to ensure accuracy.
- Ad Approval Status: Continuously review the status of your ads to address any potential rejections promptly.
- Promote In-Stock Items: Verify that your advertisements promote products that are in stock and available for purchase.
- Landing Page Alignment: Ensure that the landing pages you direct traffic to match your top products and inventory.
- Budget Allocation: Monitor daily spending and adjust budgets if necessary, following your agreement with your company.
- Track Goal Achievement: Keep a close eye on sales and orders, not just click-through rates, to gauge campaign success.
- Avoid Underinvestment: Be aware that intense competition can lead to lower spending compared to your initial expectations.
- Assess Competition: If your competitors offer better deals, consult with your company for potential adjustments or insights.
Optimizing Performance:
- Broaden Targeting: Reevaluate your audience targeting to avoid unnecessarily excluding potential customers.
- Utilize Promotion Extensions for Shopping: Implement promotion extensions for DE / EN / NL markets in your shopping campaigns.
- Leverage Sitelinks and Promo Extensions for Search: Enhance your search campaigns with sitelinks and promo extensions.
- Explore Ad Variations for RSA: Use ad variations to optimize responsive search ads.
- Display Ad Approval Check: Keep a close watch on ad approval status, especially on platforms like Sklik, to avoid any disruptions.
- Placement Tracking for Video: Monitor ad placements for video campaigns to ensure effectiveness.
- Frequency Control for Social and Display: Maintain frequency at 4-5 impressions for acquisition, 2-3 for retention, and 3-5 for remarketing.
- Clear Creative Messaging: Ensure your banners clearly convey the product, even to customers unfamiliar with your company.
Post Black Friday:
- Check for Ongoing Promotions: Verify that no old promotions or campaigns are still running.
- Adjust Account Settings: Review and adjust account settings to align with your post-Black Friday strategy.
- Implement Data Exclusions: Apply data exclusions if necessary to improve campaign performance.
- Update Website Content: Ensure all website content is up to date and relevant to post-Black Friday shoppers.
By following this checklist, you can be well-prepared for Black Friday and maximize the success of your campaigns. Good luck!
Search & Performance Max
- Ensure no limited by budget campaigns (uncapped budgets) and lowest possible ROAS set for Search & Shopping. Have at least 30%+ headroom in Search & Performance Max budget over the average daily spend in October.
- Check feed health & proper set-up of remarketing tags and conversion tracking
- Ensure customers keep the above set-up for at least 2 weeks Post-BF to capture demand resulting from new consumer behaviour
- Search Coverage: Utilise Dynamic Search Ads & Broad Keywords using value-based bidding.
- Ensure new ads & campaigns are submitted for a minimum of 3 days (or more if possible!) in advance to avoid disapprovals on the BF day.
- For Performance max, upload creatives for holiday products in separate asset groups to avoid disrupting evergreen products.
- Check for disapproved ads, shopping feed items and keyword conflicts. Fix disapproved ads/items or extensions, and remove conflicting negative keywords.
- Check Optiscore Recommendations and implement all the missing extension.
- Promotion specific Performance Max Campaigns can be created, but make sure they are active 2weeks+ in advance of the event. It is not recommended to start a fresh Performance Max campaign on the peak day as it might not bring the expected results.
Display & Video for Action Campaigns Tactical Checklist:
- Think full funnel when talking about video, display & discovery creatives and audiences. Solve the messy middle by being always on.
- Add the product feed to your YouTube VAC campaigns.
- When it comes to top funnel, use Video for Reach or Video for Awareness to optimise your CPM. Aim for a reach of at least 60% of your target audience at 1+ frequency. The ideal average frequency is in the range of 4 to 5.
- Plan for this using Reach Planner.
- Use Instant Reserve to plan ahead and be cost effective.
- Adjust Frequency Capping (FC) and Ad Schedules
- FC for video of at least 3 impressions per week
- Budgeting for VAC: Set a daily budget that is at least 15x tCPA for tCPA campaigns and 10x the expected CPA of your Max conversions campaigns. Consider a budget that is 20x your Display CPA or 30x your Search CPA if you’re not confident in expected CPA.
- Bidding: for short flights (1-3 days) we recommend Maximise conversions or Maximise Conversion Value.
- Showcase your products – add product feeds to your VAC campaigns: On average, advertisers that add product feeds to their Video action campaigns achieve over 60% more conversions at a lower cost.
- For Short flights use campaign total budget instead of daily budget. Ideally you want to set up your new creatives using an Always On campaign to not go through learning period again and avoid delays.
- Consider adding a light conversion action to ramp up campaigns more quickly.
- Audiences: Start with either “Custom Audiences – search terms” Use 10-15 of the highest converting search keywords. If you have no data on this, then start with Similar & Remarketing Audiences.
- Use Sitelink Extensions in VAC Remember to use sitelink extensions to link out to specific areas of your website. We recommend at least four.
- Complement Video for Action with Discovery Ads: follow Discovery Ads creative best practices, use all available banner formats and low-funnel audiences for best results.
- Avoid pausing good performing creatives. If your campaign message will change, include a creative with a general message as well, so your campaigns can have continuity.
- Check the Attribution report to see cross-network results & analyse the paths to conversion
Generic
- Double check logistics readiness and set up ‘fast lane’ comms channels with customers to ensure speedy resolution of any issues popping up through the day (website issues, technical issues on customer side)
- Phone check in: quick call with top customers to understand how they closed the event versus their targets; understand what’s top of mind for them after the event (wins, challenges)
Move your business beyond
Is this checklist too extensive and do you feel you could use a specialist? Let us know about your business!
