Black Friday is just around the corner and with it being undeniably one of the biggest events in retail you are sure to be wondering, how can I make sure my paid strategy achieves its goals? With it being such an important day for businesses, competition for ad space tends to be at its peak as everyone is increasing their budget to try and get ahead of the game. This blog will explore various routes you can go down to make sure your paid strategy is bulletproof this Black Friday!

Build up traffic to your site before Black Friday

While this may seem an obvious tip, ensuring you have a steady stream of users visiting your site in the lead up to Black Friday is key! These audiences can be created by retargeting and re engaging with your current site visitors and warming them up ready to target with your best Black Friday promotions.

To ensure you have the information ready to retarget I would suggest you do a bit of housecleaning on your events manager and Facebook Pixel.

Pixel Housekeeping

• Ensure all key metric events are added to the pixel
• Send traffic to each of these events to ensure its firing correctly
• Create any custom conversions to help optimise for actions that otherwise can’t be optimised for on Facebook.

Know your audience

Now you have deep cleaned your pixel and have a healthy amount of traffic coming to your website -how can you reach your target audience this Black Friday?

With bids and ad space being highly sought after during this period, keeping your audience rather broad and not so narrow could actually prove to be beneficial when implementing a Black Friday paid campaign.

As a minimum you should be retargeting and re engaging with audiences you have created via your Facebook Pixel but I have listed a few other audiences that not all marketers will have remembered to add:

• Ad engagers
• Video viewers
• Users who added items to their cart
• Buyers from the previous Black Friday
• Email lists
• Purchasers from the last 30, 60, 90 or 180 days.

Make your creatives pop!

Due to the sheer amount of competition that there is during the Black Friday period, ensuring your ads stand out is so important, these creatives will be your best shot at converting audiences.

While you may automatically go down the route of painting your brand as the best on the market, it would also be useful to include key time-sensitive information about free delivery or any sort of discount you are offering in the creative itself rather than the copy.

Whilst we’re talking about ad creatives, another tip would be to get them signed off in good time. NOBODY want to have their ads stuck in a dreaded learning phase review cycle because you’ve spotted an error, or have decided to make a last minute change. Make nailing your creatives a priority.

Accelerate your Black Friday delivery

Accelerated delivery essentially lets Facebooks spend your budget as fast as possible which, when it comes to an event like Black Friday, could be a game changer for your campaign.

Setting up accelerated delivery takes a few more tweaks and changes in the creation of the ad as Facebook will ask you to manually set a bid cap. All this means is that Facebook wants to help you to avoid paying higher costs for results while the algorithm delivers your ads.  Choosing accelerated delivery will also front load the volume of traffic to your site, enabling you to scale and shift more spend towards remarketing. Win win, right?

There are also more ways in which you can protect your budget while still accelerating delivery. You can create automation rules to automatically make changes to your account when a certain parameter reached (e.g website purchase ROAS<1).

Once you’ve read through these tips you should be ready to implement a successful Black Friday paid campaign! Building your audience early is key, as this will build the foundations for the rest of the campaign. Once you’ve created and understood your audience, you can then begin to tailor your creatives to maximise engagement with the users. While the ads are being delivered remember to keep on top of them and monitor the ads constantly to ensure they are performing to the best of their ability.

One last tip from me? Set up your Black Friday ads at least seven days before. With such an uplift in advertisers, the Facebook review system can take up to four times longer. Black Friday is all about preparation – the earlier you can put these strategies in place, the better!