Jackson Blackledge

Founder and CEO @ Echelonn

Filippo Caroli
Partner and Head of Media Buying
@ Echelonn
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Why is this
Important?
Many brands generate up to 30% of
their annual revenue during this short
period.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 1: Your ad copy

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

The Problem
Your ad copy is one of the most important aspects of
your Google Ads campaigns.
Your ad copy is your hook.

It’s your chance to grab attention and entice clicks.

But during a sales period like BCFM, you have more

competition.

Before this year, the old way was to replace your

evergreen copy with a new copy during this period.

There’s now an easier way:

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Google made this

easier to solve.
Google introduced a feature that allows you to use headlines
and descriptions as scheduled extensions for search
campaigns.

This feature lets you quickly and easily update your ads for
BFCM without disrupting your existing campaigns.

You can create a BFCM-specific headline like Black Friday: 50%

Off Shoes" and pin it to the second headline.

You can easily modify your ads to include BFCM messaging

without starting from scratch.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 2: Shopping
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Just like Search...

During BFCM, you need to position yourself strategically
so you stand out.

At Echelonn, we usually tackle this 2 ways.

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Approach 1: Add BCFM references to

Existing Products
This can be done at the product feed level, within your Google Merchant Center.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Approach 2: Create new product pages

specifically for BCFM.
This involves upgrading the former method with this added detail.
Here is a Mother's day example.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Which is better?
It all depends on your resources and you
brand.

But when customized to the degree of

Approach 2 there was much better results.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 3: Sales

Most brands misunderstand this.

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Sales Price
This can be especially be useful for holiday periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

How do we get this to happen?

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

To Enable Sales Price

To set this up, submit the original price using the
required price [price] attribute, and when you lower
the price for a sale, submit the sale price using the
optional sale price [sale_price] attribute.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Price Drop
This occurs when you change the price of your product to be lower than the
average price you've listed in the past.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

This isn't really manual

like Sales Price
Your feed should be automatically updated through
your feed tool in Shopify or whatever you use.

The key thing here is that Google operates on an

average over time.

It will compare the average price over time to the drop

in price.

If your sales price has been there for a really long time
it won't consider this a price drop.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Google Merchant Center Promotions

The key distinction is that these promotions are applied at checkout, either automatically or
with a coupon code, rather than being displayed on the product page itself.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Google makes this easy to

set up...
Go under Marketing > Promotions

And follow the flow for setting up the relevant

promotion you're doing whether that's percent off,
free gift, etc.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Evaluate which of these worked best

Go to Performance > Dashboard > Promotions then optimize your ads for which method
seems to bring the best results for your brand and products.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 4: Extensions

There are many to help boost your CTR and

visibility. But we focus on 3 main ones for
holidays like BCFM.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

1 - Promotion Extensions
This lets you highlight your BFCM deals directly in your ads.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Keep in mind the

character limits when
setting these up.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

2- Sitelink Extensions
These additional links appear beneath your ad, directing users to specific pages on your
website.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

For BFCM, you might want to create sitelinks to

your homepage, top-selling products, a Black
Friday landing page, or a Cyber Monday deals
page - whatever is most relevant for your BFCM
strategy.

The more specific to the holiday the better

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

3- Price Extensions
These showcase your products and their prices directly in your ads. This gives users a quick
overview of what you offer.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Keep in mind you can

apply this extension at
several levels
The most specific level wins:

Campaign > account

Ad group > campaign

How you apply this to your campaigns will

depend on how you've set up your account and
store.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 5: Segmentation
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

The Sales Problem

Some brands put all their products on sale,
some only a part of their inventory during
BFCM, and that's okay.

But you must ensure you're segmenting your

sale and non-sale products correctly.

This lets you bid more aggressively and

allocate more budget on your sale products
while maintaining your normal bids on your
non-sale products.

Custom labels in your product feed are the

best way to do this.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Approach 1:
Manually edit your product attributes by
editing a specific product in your Google feed
dashboard.

Note: Not recommended for every brand,

especially if you have many SKUs
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Approach 2:
Apply labels to specific products using their
specific IDs at scale.

Again this is all in an effort to be able to

customized your bidding, etc. for specific
products depending on if they're on sale.

A more optimized way to do this is to use a tool

like DataFeedWatch.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 6
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Performance Max
If you're not already familiar, pMax is a goal-based campaign that uses machine learning to
optimize your ads across all of Google's advertising channels, including Search, Display,
YouTube, Gmail, and the Google Display Network.

One of the key features of pMax is asset groups

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Now, if you're running a full-build pMax

campaign (meaning you've given it a robust set
of assets) and not just a feed-only campaign
(which pulls assets directly from your product
feed)...
Then, you should definitely leverage asset groups for BFCM.

The BFCM optimizations for feed-only campaigns would need to

happen at the feed level, using the strategies we discussed earlier,
like creating BFCM-specific product pages.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

You should create an asset group dedicated to

your BFCM sale. This asset group should
include all the elements that highlight your
BFCM offers:

Images of your top discounted products

Videos that showcase your best deals and
create urgency
Headlines that emphasize the scale of your
sale, like "Biggest BFCM Sale Ever!"
Descriptions that provide details on your
offers and encourage shoppers to act fast
Dominating BCFM with Google ads
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 7
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Most brands make the mistake of

just setting up a discount code and
running with it.

But that's like fishing without checking the

weather forecast or knowing what type of fish
are in the lake.

To launch and measure a successful BFCM

strategy…

Start by pulling reports from last year's BFCM

campaigns.

Paying close attention to your key metrics

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

1 - Check who your competitors were

last year.
Using the insights reports to:

Filter by specific campaigns

View it as a linear graph to get strategic and performance insights over time of
competitors
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

2 - Check your Shopify Analytics

Check your marketing mix.

What channels got you the most profits last year?

Set the right expectations and predictions for each of your platforms.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

3 - Google Trends
Are your main keywords seeing a consistent year-on-year trend in response to holidays,
etc.

This lets you appropriately plan your budgets.

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 8
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Custom Audiences

To begin retargeting:

Go to GA4 > Audiences > New Audience >

Create Custom Audience

Filter by:

Black Friday Cyber Monday Period

Only website visitor (no conversions i.e.
purchases "0")
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 9
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Google recently replaced discovery

campaigns with demand generation.
We use this to target people who are in the early stages of the buying journey browsing on
either YouTube, Gmail or Google’s mobile app.

This is particularly important before BFCM.

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

How you can use this:

Create hype around campaigns

You could do this by retargeting your current

audience/customers with BCFM-specific ads.

The best way to do this is to have a dedicated

sign-up page to receive an early access code for
the coming sale.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

How to steal your competitor’s BCFM traffic

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 10
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Method 1 - Best Practices

for a Keyword Competitor
Campaign
Make it a seperate campaign

Use "phrase" or [exact] match on your competitors

name

For Shopping, you can actually include competitor

names in the product title after 70-75 characters
(Google doesn't show this anyway).
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Method 2 - Custom
Audiences using Your
Competitors Website
1. Go inside your YouTube/Demand Gen Campaign

2. Create Segment > Custom Segment

3. Click "People who browse websites similar to"...

This is NOT directly marketing to the website. But gives

Google a signal to find people who are browsing
website like that one. Use this as a way to convince that
specific segment that your product is better.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 11
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Every brand dreams of having its

BFCM campaign blow up and go viral.

But what most brands don’t need is this can cause an avalanche effect.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Google floods with

searches for your brand
and products.
And if you’re not ready for this influx of volume - it can
actual hurt more than it helps on the Google ads side of
things.

If your Google Ads campaign aren’t set up properly

Google’s algorithm won’t function properly.

This can hurt your brand.

Dominating BCFM with Google ads

When setting up your campaigns...

Separating your branded and non-branded search terms into distinct campaigns is crucial.

This allows you to better control your budgets, bids, and targeting strategies for each type
of search query.

So even if your branded terms blow up from your viral social media ads, your prospecting
campaigns are protected.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 12
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

With all the focus on ad strategy and

viral potential, it's easy to overlook
the fundamentals.
But things like shipping deadlines can make or break your BFCM success.

One important feature is adjusting your shipping time specifically for certain holidays.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

To set up estimated delivery

times in Google Merchant
Center, you need...
Cut-off time (deadline by which a customer must
place their order for it to begin processing on the
same day)

Number of business days needed to process an

order before it ships

The number of business days it takes for a carrier to

deliver a package once it is picked up from your
facility.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Point 13
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Where to find this:

Under Tools > Budgets and Bidding >

Adjustments

You can check the conversion rate

change last year and mirror that here.
Dominating BCFM with Google ads

Thank you!
Jackson Blackledge
Founder and CEO @ Echelonn

Filippo Caroli
Partner and Head of Media Buying
@ Echelonn