Help Your Brand to Stand Out This Black Friday!

Ker-ching! Are You Ready for The Biggest Shopping Weekend of the Year?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are approaching fast – it’s time to make sure your Google Shopping campaign is ready for action!

An import from the US that’s been gaining traction here for a number of years, Black Friday is always the day after Thanksgiving, which is always on the third Thursday in November. This year, that puts Black Friday on the 24^th, with Cyber Monday following on November 27^th.

Black Friday is so called because it’s around the time retailers ‘move into the black’, breaking even in terms of covering their costs across the year. Now, it’s also become a useful tool to kick start Christmas shopping, with savvy shoppers preparing carefully to bag the best bargains possible.

Traditionally the domain of bricks and mortar retailers, Black Friday is gaining even more momentum with the advent of Cyber Monday. Now, it’s more than one of the biggest internet shopping days of the year: it’s a weekend long shopping fest with many retailers offering deep discounts for the entire 4 days.

So, if shoppers are prepared, you need to be too. With just a few weeks to go, let me give you the inside info on how to optimise your feed – plus you’ll find more hints and tips in the Web Bureau’s next eBook: The Beginner’s Guide to Google Shopping, due to be published soon. Watch this space!

Google wants to give its users thee best possible experience. That means giving them good information that they can act on. So, if you give Google good, accurate and detailed information, you’re halfway to showing up in a search.

To determine which search queries are best answered by your ads, Google takes into account your feed, your site and your bids:

• Your feed lives in Google Merchant Center where it comes to life as a Product Listing Ad (PLA) right. These are one of the leading traffic sources, enabling you to attract new customers at competitive cost.
• The image is perhaps the most important factor in getting clicks. Study Google Shopping’s rules on using the right imagery and make sure your description is detailed and accurate.
• The price can be just as important and is either a deal maker or deal breaker. Where products are generic and customers are price sensitive, a high price can damage your listing. Conversely, where a product is unique or offers clear advantages, buyers expect to pay a higher price point. Knowing your product and your market is essential.
• Make sure your product title is accurate and descriptive; use a brand name wherever possible, include top keywords, and details such as colour and size as appropriate.
• Your product description is just as important – be concise and accurate, use keywords and use them sparingly, don’t oversell and keep it short and sweet.
• If you’re in a specialist area, include things like model numbers or known category identifiers like year or edition.
• Google has a category and subcategory for almost everything, so make sure your product is in the right place and where Google can find it.
• You don’t have to build your feed manually. If you’ve got a lot of inventory, you can use a plug-in, app or extension to pull in data from your site and to format it in a way that Google likes.
• Set yourself up for Google Analytics and connect to your Adwords account to find more ways to track conversion, evaluate engagement data and improve targeting through remarketing lists.

Google Shopping is such a dynamic and evolving platform, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your numbers, reports and the competition: seasonal changes – like those happening right now! - sales and search will all affect your results.

Check in with your reporting as frequently as necessary and take a proactive approach to tinkering with bidding and optimisation to see what really works for you.

As the experts, the Web Bureau’s eCommerce experts work alongside your team to feed your products into a strategic selection of online marketplaces and global channels. Ask us how we would analyse your data to explore customer journeys, review your sales funnel and monitor the check-out process. By refining the experience for existing users and maximising their conversion rate, we can help you drive sales.