Pamela SapioThe next big sale event is just around the corner.
Are your paid ad campaigns ready to maximize revenue?
Recently on the Curry, Cheese, and Vegemite podcast on our YouTube channel, Solutions 8 strategy wizards Glen, Colby, and Usama shared their best tips for success.
Read on for a quick breakdown of the strategies discussed, or click here to watch the video.
Keep it simple: just the basics.
To start the video, Glen asks Colby and Usama if there was any particular method or strategy they used prior to the most recent Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales period to help them stay on track with performance goals.
We hear first from Usama, who says the best strategy is to keep it simple and just do the basics first. Specifically, that includes the merchant center promo, headline pinning (he always pins his headlines in position for the duration of the sale—for brand and non-brand sales), and promotion extensions.
He points out that for one account he launched a YouTube Ads campaign for all of his visitors and his customer list, and that has been working really well.
Use account-level headlines and descriptions.
Colby jumps in and mentions that he heard another expert (Nils Rooijmans) talking recently about quick account wins and how you can make account-level headlines and descriptions. These could work well for BFCM and other similar promotion periods and allow advertisers to just “do everything in bulk” and save a little time.
A word of caution, however: Usama tried this feature—located in the Assets section—and could not get his headline to show up consistently. “I want it there every single time, and the only way I’ve been able to do that is when I actually go inside the ad and make the change,” he explains.
If the process sounds time-consuming, Usama says it doesn’t have to be. You just go into all of your ads and find and replace your headlines. He says he has one that he always has pinned to the second position regardless of the ad, and then he just changes it back and forth.
He adds that the way he structures his ads is usually a little different, for example he has some headlines pinned at one and some at two. The ones are more generic (for example, brand terminology) and the twos are the headline selling points, so he will just replace one of the selling points that he has pinned that to.
“It’s just a simple find and replace, copy paste, and it just does everything for you.”
Push a little harder before the craze begins.
Colby really likes the idea of pushing a little bit harder before the craze of BFCM happens—possibly early November or even late October—when the CPCs are lower.
“If you think about it, you just want to prime the audience, make sure that when you’re looking at the percentage of new traffic versus old, you’re starting to pick up on more cold traffic in those earlier weeks, and then you can just push harder with more general targeting or even retargeting come Black Friday/Cyber Monday.”
Basically, he explains, we just want to establish that really big base, get people in, and be top of mind for some of these people. And if we can do it during a period where things are cheaper? Even better.
Use this "lazy hack" from Usama.
At this point in the video, Usama gives viewers what he calls a “lazy hack”.
Sharing a screenshot, he goes over something he tends to do with a lot of his accounts when a promo is coming up. Specifically, he will ask the client what their acceptable in-app tROAS is. (He cautions that it can’t be too high.) Then, about a week or a week and a half before the sale event starts, he starts to increase budget.
Usama sets the budget really high and sets the tROAS to what the client wants in app—or what he needs in app to achieve what the client wants. He does this across the board, and then he leaves it alone. Why does it work?
“Because your tCPA acts like a gatekeeper, a mitigator for your budget, but not touching the campaign and giving it the leg room to actually spend when it can and it needs to, it just skyrockets … and it’s worked for me every single time.”
Glen says this dovetails perfectly into his strategy.
Try Glen's portfolio strategy.
Prior to the recent BFCM promo period, Glen created a portfolio bid strategy with multiple Standard Shopping campaigns in it with different product ranges, and he started with a low tROAS. But, he also attached a portfolio budget—a big one—giving it around $2,000 or $3,000 a day, and then he let it go. And within 10 to 14 days, he was hitting that objective.
At that point, he would increase the portfolio budget but drop the portfolio bid by 10% so that the budget can spend. It would then spend more, and once he starts seeing more spend, he increases the portfolio bid back up. Then he increases the budget again to try to get more spend coming in. Then, after about three or four days, he drops the portfolio bid—and so on and so forth by upping the ROAS, then pulling back a bit.
The result?
The portfolio bid strategy kept spending more and more while hitting the tROAS.
This is very similar to Usama’s strategy, says Glen, adding that massaging and manipulating the bids and the budgets through this method worked really well. Usama asks if he tried just leaving the tROAS as is and running with the high budget, but Glen explains that it just wouldn’t spend.
“This is something I’m going to do pretty consistently now, especially if a client’s got a sale coming up,” Glen concludes. He is also going to see if he can turn this into an evergreen strategy, so be sure to stay tuned for more.
Let us know if you try any of these strategies before your next sales event and how it goes!
