The 2022 holiday season is just around the corner, and with that comes the biggest week of the year for most eCommerce brands – Black Friday/Cyber Monday (also referred to as BFCM). As a Paid Social Senior Strategist here at Socium Media, I’ve worked on my fair share of Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns, so I thought I’d share four helpful tips I’ve learned along the way.
1. Start your promos earlier!
Over the last couple of years, you may have noticed Black Friday promos starting earlier and earlier. Well, there’s a strategic reason for that – CPMs tend to be at their highest during the week of Black Friday and going into Cyber Monday, so most brands have decided to start their promos in early-mid November to combat rising CPMs.
Rising CPMs aren’t the only reason many eCommerce brands started their promos earlier in November, though. Another critical factor is the psychology behind consumer spending. Most consumers have a set budget for their holiday shopping lists – or at least they try to stay within a certain budget. With that in mind, brands have started deploying promo ads earlier in November to ensure they reach consumers before they spend all their budget.
2. Create separate campaigns for Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads!
By doing this, you’re ensuring those ads are getting their own dedicated spend. This not only helps your BFCM ad delivery, but it also allows you to keep your evergreen ads running at the same time without interfering with their spend. I know consolidation is the name of the game right now, but this is one of the few times where creating additional campaigns can really help scale your account!
Just remember to keep those campaigns on CBO and set min and max spend limits if you see some ad sets not getting enough spend/getting too much spend.
3. Expand your audiences!
Depending on your audience type, I suggest taking a few different approaches: for prospecting, try layering in Black Friday and Cyber Monday interest targeting and building Lookalike audiences based on past BFCM + previous sales purchasers.
For remarketing, open up custom audiences to the max and layer in your most up-to-date email lists. And for retention, include customer lists of people who shopped BFCM in previous years. The results will surprise you.
4. Optimize, optimize, optimize!
As you continue monitoring ad sets, be sure to reallocate spend from poor-performing ad sets to high-performing ad sets. This helps ensure you’re spending budget as effectively as possible and maximizing the potential conversion rate.
And although you’re going to be heavily focused on your BFCM campaigns, don’t forget about your evergreen campaigns as well. I’ve noticed in the past that as BFCM ads begin taking off, non-related ad performance increases too.
In summary…
No two holiday seasons are the same, which means neither are paid social approaches. However, you can always take steps to make the most of your time, budget, and resources.
Have a hot tip that I missed? Reach out to me on LinkedIn; I’m always down to geek out about paid social!
Oh, and if you’re looking for an award-winning agency to help with manage your paid social campaigns from start to finish, please get in touch!
PS: In the spirit of giving, here are a few bonus tips!
💡 Check account spending limits on Ads Manager to ensure you do not hit your daily max. Contact a Meta rep on chat support for more details and begin asking for increases now!
💡 If your account uses DPAs, check which products deliver the most impressions within the platform and also check within the source of truth to see what products are sold the most from that campaign. It could help inform what categories or styles to push!
💡 This is not the time of year to use rules to pause or activate ads! I don’t know how many horror stories I’ve heard of account managers using rules during BFCM and the rules not working correctly, but you do not want to be another casualty of Facebook Ads glitches.
- 4 Paid Social Tips to Help Get the Most Out of Your Holiday Campaigns - November 17, 2022
