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Maximizing Promotions: A Guide For the Junior Campaign Manager
In 2021 retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide and are about to grow by 50% over the next four years. This is a lot of money and a big opportunity for growth.
As campaign managers, our job is to take care of our client’s campaign performance and maximize their results. We are being measured by our ability to achieve goals of revenue, ROAS and other KPIs. While the on-going activity is crucial to fulfil these goals, promotions are the money-makers for leverage and performance. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, No VAT, and X% off promotions can change the entire monthly performance. This article will share three simple tips that will help you mazimize your promotions.
Table of Contents
The Power Of Preparations
Entering the world of PPC during the shopping season is the best, and busiest, opportunity to learn what to do and what not to do. The metrics of revenue and ROAS can have a significant impact on your campaign as a result of several simple actions. One of the more important things to note before all else is making sure your promotion stands out. You need to understand why the client wants to have the promotion. What is the goal? Is it to increase the average order value? Is it to increase sales overall? Maybe the promotion goal is to acquire new users? Every promotion has its own goals and KPIs to be measured, so it is essential to ask the “W” questions.
The “W” Questions
- When – When to have the promotion: Special events (Black friday / summer sale / holidays), Launch (of a new product / brand / site), etc.
- What – What is the type of promotion? For example: X% off, Buy one get one, etc.
- Who – Who is the target audience?
- Broad
- Remarketing – past purchasers, cart abandoners, visitors?
- Acquisition – new users
- How – Promotion practice
- Automatic discount or coupon code
Actions To Take
Once you’ve answered the “W” questions, you should start to think about the following preparations:
- Creating new ads for the promotion
- Creatives – remember to have eye-catching creatives and more than one ad type (For example – For Facebook, use single images, carousel, and collection ads).
- Remember to use CTAs and have the unique proposal of the promotion right in the first sentence of the ad.
- Creating relevant extensions on Google ads:
- Promo extensions
- Sitelinks
- etc.
- Increasing budgets for the relevant platforms and campaigns
Managing Your Promotion
After you set the foundation for your promotion and ensured that everything is prepared, it’s time to maximize.
During your promotion, you must take everything you learned about your account activity and maximize it. Remember to monitor your budgets (increase where you can, meaning push when you recognize good performance, and shift budgets from campaigns that are not working well). Also, it’s important to know that if you have a long promotion (more than 5 days), you can also try for more creatives to be A/B tested. One of the best tools to help maximize performance is using Seasonality Adjustment in Google ads.
The metrics of revenue and ROAS can have a significant impact on your campaign as a result of several simple actions. One of the more important things to note before all else is making sure your promotion stands out.
What is Seasonality Adjustment?
Seasonality Adjustment is an advanced tool that helps you optimize bids for Search, Shopping, and Display campaigns using tROAS and tCPA bid strategies, or Smart Shopping and Performance Max campaigns using all bid strategies. The right way to use it is when you are predicting changes in conversion rates (which often happen during promotions).
Bid Adjustments & How to Use It
Let’s assume that we expect a 30% increase in conversion rate for the upcoming promotion.
We can create a seasonal bid adjustment of 30% for the relevant campaigns by doing the following:
1. In the top right-hand corner, click the tools icon Google Ads
2. Click Bid Strategies under “Shared Library”
3. Select Advanced Controls from the page menu on the left and select the Seasonality Adjustments option at the top.
4. To create a new seasonality adjustment, click the blue plus button.
5. Name your adjustment, give it a description, and set the start and end times
a. (Please note that based on Adcore’s best practice, it’s recommended to have one seasonal adjustment for each day)*
6. Select the campaigns and devices
a. Pro tip: Adjust the seasonal adjustment for each specific campaign*
7. Adjust your conversion rate to reflect your estimated conversion rate change.
8. Click save.
After setting the seasonal adjustment, remember to monitor your campaigns and see its effect. If you realize you can push more, don’t be afraid to do so!
The Day After
After your promotion ends, it is essential to make sure things go back to normal:
- Monitor your budgets – decrease back if needed
- Use negative seasonality adjustments or data exclusion
- Change back to original ads
- Share the results of the promotion with your client
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