A very busy weekend has been had for marketers globally managing the wide range of retail clients with Black Friday and Cyber Monday ad campaigns running. Those with B2B clients likewise busy making sure budget is not being directed towards consumer intent search queries, and in many cases reducing budget altogether over the period. Here is a roundup of some of the top media happenings over the period:
- YouTube has integrated with Nielsen TV Data to help advertisers understand the effect on reach when uniting the forces of TV campaigns with YouTube. There are also functions for marketers to gather post campaign analysis from the Reach Planner, which is really helpful for understanding the effectiveness of the campaign. This is another great tool to assist with moving more spend from offline to digital and understanding the impact of this.
- Google made the search term [Christmas] more child-friendly by changing the SERP from displaying shopping ads with products such as festive underwear to a knowledge card. Interestingly the ads in question may not have been targeting [Christmas] at all, but have triggered due to broad match or close variants matching.
- Search engine land released a great article for last minute Black Friday checks. Fun fact – there is an in-market audience for ‘People who will shop sales around the United States Thanksgiving holiday (including Cyber Monday)’.
- Automated bid strategies are growing in popularity as they take the stress away from manual bidding. If for any reason there is a low CVR day, or your top competitor does something crazy and unpredictable like launching a 40% off deal on a random Tuesday, Google understands intent in real time and will reduce the investment much quicker than anyone could predict this via data analysis. This article gives some great suggestions how “top signals” from Google can be used in bidding strategies cross-channel.
We’ll have a few days to wait yet to understand the full impact of Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year for retailers, but as a key sales period for almost every retailer and a bell weather for annual performance, it’s a telling time. Finder has predicted that Brits will spend a total of £5.6M, with an average of £235 per person.
