Gina here with Starter PPC. Happy Halloween. I'm wearing my ghost earrings. I have my bats up and because it's Halloween, we are in the depths of prep pairing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which begins the last Friday of November, so this year it'll be like the 23rd or the 24th or something like that of November. Yes, we prepare almost a month ahead of time because there's a lot of, things to think about and moving pieces, to consider. I want to run through a list of things to think about to help you guys prepare for Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend. If you're an e commerce company. The first thing and most important thing is to plan your budget, right? So if you've been watching my channel, you'll know that most months out of the year, we like to do over pacing on the budget for the first two weeks of the month and then under pacing of the budget for the last two weeks of the month. November is the one exception to that rule. We usually do one of two things, and we will ask the clients which one they prefer. So either we keep the budget, what it is, and we actually underpace a little bit for the first three weeks of November so that we can reserve. Budget for Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, right? Because the market is going to balloon on those dates. So you want to make sure you have an available budget that you planned for that. You can capture that extra those extra conversions and not just let the holiday pass you by. so that's one option. The second option is to spend the way that you were spending previously, right? We might not do the over pacing under pacing. but we might just take the monthly budget and just spend divided by 30 and spend it, and then have a separate dedicated additional budget just for Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, which I think is four days. I've even seen where clients will say, hey, for that, for those four days, go ahead and spend whatever you want, just put a target row as, Restriction on it because I don't want the ROAS to just go all the way down to 30 percent on that day, but like a reasonable 100 percent ROAS is good because that means I'm getting like 200 percent MER and, I don't mind that it's not my 250, which is my goal and the are because the holiday weekend and I want to build my list of customers who are hopefully going to maybe buy. another thing in the spring. So these are things that you might want to think about and consider a couple of options for you guys. something to keep in mind is that the sales in the first three weeks of November are usually a little bit down, and that's because a big chunk of the market knows that Black Friday is coming up, and if they want to buy something, they might actually be waiting to buy it on that weekend. Which sucks, but that's the way that it is. So that's part of the reason why we don't do over pacing for the first two weeks of November. It just doesn't make sense. Why would we spend the money then when we can probably spend it, a lot easier, with better performance, and the last week of November, all right, so budget plans, budget does the other way. Let's move on to other things. First of all, for your black Friday, Sale, it's recommended to just do like a storewide discount, right? Nothing too fancy, not like a buy to get a free gift or anything like that. mostly because that's just what everyone's expecting for black Friday, cyber Monday, that is the holiday. It's like just, storewide 30 percent off or whatever you want to think about. What is the most amount I can discount all my products and still make a little bit of a profit. Keep in mind, you're going for volume that weekend, you're not going for return. And when you have three times as many conversions, you don't have to make. as high of a return, because you have three times, the, revenue coming in. And each time the conversion is made, you make a little bit of profit. Yes, your profit might be more slim, but you're making a lot of it. So it balances out. And then you have all these new, customers who are familiar with your brand. And I don't know if you guys have ever heard this stat before, but. Once somebody has already bought from you, they are 10 times more likely to buy from you again than a cold lead coming to see you for the first time is likely to buy from you. something to consider. All right. So once you've come up with what your discount can be, how steep. put it up on your site, right? so obviously, if you can just put up a banner, that's the most straightforward way to do it. However, I would recommend having it in like a section as well. So when I say banner, I'm talking about, how like Shopify stores have that little black banner right below the, main navigation menu or right above the main navigation menu. But since it's Black Friday and it's such a big weekend, you might also consider creating like a dedicated section of the homepage of your site. you could make a thicker banner. you could have somebody design it on Canva for free. And you can design it on Canva for free. I actually pulled up Canva cause I wanted to show you guys what I would do. To my website, I would go to canva. com, get the free version of Canva, search for Black Friday, Black Friday sale. How's that? And Canva has tons of ideas. So I would just create a really thin, banner and I would shove it right on top of everything on my website, like right below the main navigation menu. I'd put it right there on the homepage. I'd put it on the product. categories pages. and, I would just put it all over something like this, right? This is a very, I'll, click on it. You can see, yeah, these are great. This is a great example of the type of like banner I would put on my website. Obviously, you don't need to have this text because they're going to be on the site. So just change this out. You can start with a template and customize it from there. you also can in Canva, you can just tell it what dimensions you want and start from scratch, right? Click create a design. You don't have to start with a design. you do have to be careful. Some of these are pro, which means you have to upgrade in order to use them. some of them are paid, which means you don't have upgraded pro, but you have to pay for that template. usually it's just a few dollars and then some of them are free. Like here's a free one. It doesn't have a little icon in the corner. that's what I would do to my website. Okay. And then, the third thing I want to talk about is shopping ad promos. So for those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, I pulled up some examples. once you have a promotion going on your website. it's really important to display that on your shopping ads, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Cause if you've used Google shopping at all, you've seen this, it says special offer. And when you hover over it, it tells you about the special offer. sometimes the promotions don't show up like that. Sometimes it shows up like this 5 off if you buy 100 or more. sometimes it just shows like a discounted price. And to be honest, I think those are, the way it's displayed is automatically chosen by Google. but you do have some control over it. So there's a couple of ways to go about this. First of all, some stores, like I think Shopify has, this has something called automated discounts. So you can Google automated discounts and read this article right here in the, Google support page. And it talks about how to turn this on. And that means that Google will do its best to communicate with Shopify and figure out what promotions are already set up in Shopify and it will automatically display on the shopping ads. Now, if you're like me and you don't trust that to work and you want to make sure that it's actually working, on Black Friday, because you have four days to get it across, then what you're going to want to do is go to merchants. google. com, log into your Google Merchant Center, click on marketing and then promotions and just set it up. And in order to set it up, you have to understand how the promotion works, right? So before you do this, go to your. eCommerce store, build the promotion, and then go over to Google Merchant Center and set it up. As you walk through this process, it's going to ask you questions like, which categories are you promoting? and if you say the total store, but over in your eCommerce store, you set it up to do the entire store except for sale items, the promotion is going to get disapproved. On Black Friday morning, because it's going to see the settings don't match. and so you have to be really specific, really, detail oriented and really accurate when you're setting up promotions in Google Merchant Center, right? You have to know exactly how you set it up in your e commerce store. If it's for the total store, it's for the total store. If it's for total store, but sales item, except for sales items, you have to say it's for all these categories and not list the sale item category. just be very specific with how you discuss the promotion. It's also going to ask you, does it automatically apply at the discount? Is there a code people have to copy and paste? How does it work? So these are all things that you're going to have to know in order to get a promotion to show up on your shopping ads. hi there, quick interruption. Do you know the main thing that prevents small business owners from getting their Google Ads account into a position to grow and scale budget? A lot of businesses, especially those that are just starting out, have limited budgets. And so because of this, they're turned away by most ad agencies because most ad agencies have minimum budget thresholds that they're willing to work with. So what happens is the business owners end up learning Google Ads themselves. And the problem with that is that most of the advice online is geared towards larger accounts. And the advice doesn't have any of those strategies or tricks that can kickstart the algorithm into giving a small account a leg up over larger competitors. So it often just doesn't work. And the business just ends up losing money month over month. If this sounds familiar, starter PPC can help. We offer Google ads management services that are designed for accounts that have between 1, 000 and 5, 000 budgets. Because all of our clients are just starting out, we've come up with ways to keep our management fees significantly lower than most agencies, because we know that every dollar saved on management fees just goes towards the ad budget, which is going to help the algorithm gather speed and power. So if you're serious about growing your business and you'd like a team of Google ads experts to help you without breaking the bank, check us out at starter PPC. com. Okay. Back to the video. Okay. moving on, let's talk about creative assets like images for image ads and videos for video ads. I think this is a little bit above and beyond for a promotion that just goes on for only four days. depending on how much you benefit from Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend, maybe you've done it in the past. You were like, wow, that was amazing. I can't wait to do it again. you might want to pull out all the stops and build image ads just for black Friday. and you could even do video ads just for black Friday. if it was me, I'd probably just be building assets for Christmas. And because those are going to run, for a few weeks instead of just for four days. but it's really up to you. it depends on, how creatively inclined you are, How much you like this holiday and things like that. First thing you can do is you can brainstorm, some ideas for image ads by just literally going to Google images and searching black Friday image ad. no joke, you guys, this is a great way to get the creative juices flowing. or those Canva templates are great. don't have to use Canva templates just for making section of your site. You can also use Canva templates to make image ads. when you're making image ads, I would make a square version and a 2 to 1 ratio rectangle version. Of each ad. So you could just make one set, right? A square and a rectangle, or you could make three versions of it, but make a square and a rectangle of each version. send it to your ads manager, or you can hop into the ads and, if you have a display campaign going already, a display image campaign going already, I would just go in there. Duplicate the ad, swap out the images for just the Black Friday images. honestly, I would just temporarily turn off the non Black Friday ad for those four days, and then turn it back on when you're done with the Black Friday version of the ad. So you have two ads the same campaign, but you're going to turn the one off that's been running, and turn on your Black Friday one that only has Black Friday images to force budget into those images real fast. If you try to feed those images into Google, I'm not even sure if it's going to use it. And honestly, Google doesn't even give us much data on how much budget is dedicated to every image. Anymore these days. So your best bet is to force budget into a copied version of your image ads, in order to get it to go quickly and spend a lot on it during those days. Another thing that you can do is I really like the facebook ad library. You can go here select all ads and then literally just keyword search for like black friday because it just helps me see what? Other people are doing with their ads. Okay. Here's like an example of a video ad. Here's an example of an image ad. granted, these are all Facebook ads, not Google ads, it is something helps to brainstorm. Obviously social media ads are a little bit different. They're usually like more casual and more, Social, you can also go to the ads transparency center on Google and try to search, but I have not found much luck in here because you have to search for an advertiser. So you can't just put in a keyword like black Friday and see what comes up. You have to find one of your competitors and the only ones you're going to find in here are the really big competitors. So if you have a big competitor that you someday want to be like. Go to the Google ads transparency center and look for them and you can see what their Google ads look like, which is really powerful. It's just sometimes hard to find what you're looking for. video is hard, but I just wanted to recommend one thing, which is if you already have videos that you use as ads, it's really easy to take that video and slap a five second opener onto the front, the beginning of that video that says, our black Friday sale is on it's You know, this much discount, and it's running on these dates. And then you start the regular ad. now if you're thinking, gosh, that is a lot of work and then I have to upload it to YouTube and then I have to upload it to Google and then I have to make a duplicate of the ad and I have to try to get it to spend on that image ad just for those four days, I feel, yeah, I probably wouldn't go that far, but again, it's a personal preference thing. It just depends on a lot of things about your business. And whether you want to do video ads just for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, just throwing ideas out there. Okay. there's two more things I want to mention. One is, ad text. so a great way to add Black Friday ad text is to go over to the assets section over here, instead of your Google ad account and add it using a promotional asset. if you're like, that's not enough. I don't just want it to show up in a promotional, a promotion asset. assets are like those extensions that you see on the bottom of the ads and they don't always show, right? It's up to Google whether to show it or not On your text ads, you're like, that's not enough for my text ads. I really rely heavily on text ads. I want it to be in like my main header. Again, duplicate the ad, make a Black Friday, cyber Monday version of the ad, and temporarily just turn off the main. Ad for those four days and turn it back on at the end of the weekend, no big deal. And you can swap out the text all you want, inside of that duplicated version of your text ad. All right. The last thing I want to mention is email, right? It doesn't have much to do with Google ads, but it is something that's super powerful and I didn't want to skip over it. Don't forget to set up a couple of emails. Not just one, a couple around Black Friday, Saber Monday, everyone who's on your list, whether they're just a lead or whether they're a past, customer, tell them about your discount. all right. That's about it. Thanks for watching. Best of luck.