7 Tips To Prepare Your Amazon PPC Campaigns for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

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7 Tips To Prepare Your Amazon PPC Campaigns for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Ayush Choudhary

22 Nov 2022

Amazon Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale is around the corner. It’s no secret that this is one of the biggest holiday seasons and is a critical time of the year for online retailers.

Last year alone, shoppers spent $8.9 billion on Black Friday and an impressive $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday.

So if you haven’t planned your Amazon Ads strategy for the Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you are going to miss out on a big opportunity.

Even if you’ve meticulously planned all your Amazon PPC campaigns, you will still need to ensure that you monitor the account on the day. This is crucial to ensure that any unanticipated circumstances are swiftly responded to.

In this blog post, we will share 7 quick tips on how to get the most out of this sales event from your Amazon PPC campaigns.

1. Clean Up Your Amazon PPC Account

Amazon PPC Campaigns require regular monitoring and optimisation. If you haven’t manually audited your account for a while, you may notice that over a period of time a lot of “undeliverable” targets and search terms get accumulated. Before any big sale event like Prime Day or Black Friday, it’s always recommended to audit the entire account once for all sorts of hygiene issues and take appropriate measures to fix them.

So what do we mean by “cleaning up”?

Pause all the targets that have received limited impressions in the last 30 days and the bids are already too high.
Negate all the irrelevant search terms that have got significant clicks but haven’t resulted got any orders in the past 30 days.
Pause targets with ACOS 2–3 times higher than your target ACOS or with notably low conversion rates and high ACOS.
Pause campaigns that haven’t worked well in the last 30 days (campaigns with significantly high ACOS or low conversion rate).

Since CPCs are way higher during these days, you need to ensure that you’re spending on the right keywords and targets. This one-time exercise before the event will help you ensure that your Ad Spends are going on targets that are working well for your account and not on the bleeding ones.

2. Increase Bids to Be Competitive

Every brand wants to get the highest possible visibility and rank during events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday in order to capitalize on the increased traffic.

What does this mean for you?

An increase in CPC.

Therefore, it is advisable to raise the bids by 15% to 20% throughout the event days to stay competitive. You can also consider increasing bids by different percentages for different targets based on their past performances.

Now you must be wondering how to increase bids of all targets if you have thousands of targets spread among hundreds of campaigns.

Well, you can navigate to the “Targeting” tab in AMS and you’ll get the list of all your targets. From there, you can raise bids of up to 300 targets at once. If you’re an Adbrew customer, you can use our automated rules to pre-plan these changes for your entire account ahead of time.

3. Leverage Dayparting (Hourly Bidding) & Amazon Marketing Stream

Do you have a limited Ad budget and you’re unsure whether your budget will last throughout the sale event day or not?

If yes, then Dayparting can be a big savior for you. It allows you to split a day into hourly segments and do precise hourly targeting. With Amazon Marketing Stream, you can check the historical performance of your account and campaigns by the hour of the day for different placements.

You can then set up Dayparting automation in Adbrew to run your ads at different bids at different hours of the day. This will not only help you ensure that you stay within budget but also let you drive the maximum ROI from your PPC campaigns throughout the day.

4. Increase Budget To Accommodate Increase in Traffic

Increased traffic combined with a higher CPC means you will need a higher campaign budget to keep your ads running throughout the day.

The last thing you would want during this sale event is to go out of budget and lose the brand’s visibility on the biggest day of the year. Thus, it is extremely important to keep campaigns active. Don’t forget to keep an eye on your budget caps and make sure you do not hit them.

This applies especially to those campaigns which are performing really well. Moreover, be flexible if you see that the performance is good on D-Day and the number of orders is growing hour by hour. If everything is working well, invest more budget because it will eventually pay off.

We recommend increasing the budget by at least 40-50% in advance during the sale period and then either manually auditing or setting up budget automation to increase budgets for campaigns based on how well they perform.

5. Launch Special Black Friday & Cyber Monday Campaigns

To make the most of this sale event, we recommend launching a few new campaigns that specifically target deal-hunting shoppers.

You can look at the historical data from the previous year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and identify the sale-related keywords that converted well for your brand. If you do not have access to this data, simply create variations of your top-performing keywords using event-specific terms such as “black friday,” “cyber monday,” and “deals.”

For example; if you’re selling handmade candles – black friday handmade candles, handmade candles deal, handmade candle cyber monday deals, etc can be good keywords to target.

While it is tempting to target high search volume keywords such as “black friday” or “cyber monday deals,” we do not recommend doing so if controlled ACOS is your objective because they will not only have a very high CPC but also an extremely low conversion rate due to lack of clear buying intent.

Instead, we recommend adding them as negative exact in your Auto and other top-of-the-funnel campaigns.

6. Protect your Brand

Your overall marketing strategy should be backed by solid brand protection campaigns.

The competition will be fierce during the sale event, which means your competitors will be aggressive on your branded keywords and ASINs as well.

So if you aren’t aggressively defending your branded search terms and product pages, you might see your market share decline.

Therefore, it’s recommended to go aggressive on branded terms and products to protect your brand and make it difficult for your competitors to steal your customers.

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7. Do Not Forget to Re-target Post Sale Event

As discussed above, it is always expected to see a significant jump in traffic on Amazon during Black Friday and Cyber Monday week. A major portion of that traffic is just going to browse through your or competitor’s products but won’t make any purchases during the sale event.

This is why it’s recommended to have sponsored display and DSP retargeting campaigns running so that you can reach out to those people who viewed your product but didn’t buy during the sale.

With sponsored display, you can target audiences who viewed your advertised product or similar advertised products in the last 7 days.

Feels like a lot of manual work?

Do not worry. Adbrew can help you with your entire peak preparation. We have built-in bulk changes features and advanced automation capabilities to take all of these sale event-related actions with just a click of a button. Schedule a call with us or visit our website to learn more.

Shivam Kumar