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13 December 2018 / Opinion

Utilising supplemental feeds on Black Friday

Robbie Decker / PPC Senior Analyst

In one of our recent blog posts we discussed some of the most beneficial uses of supplemental feeds to enhance your shopping campaigns.

In this post we’ll look at how successful two of our own supplemental feed tactics proved over the Black Friday period for one of our retail clients, Furniture Choice.

1 – Black Friday tailored product descriptions

One of the strategies identified in our previous article, which explored how to make the most of Supplement Feeds, discussed using a supplemental feed to temporarily alter the titles/descriptions of your products. We implemented this very tactic for Furniture Choice to promote the products with Black Friday price tags.

Including Black Friday messaging gave these products a much stronger chance of being served to users Black Friday related searches. The images below show how effective this method proved to work, with our client dominating for each respective product searches in their Shopping feed.

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Furniture Choice dominated the feed for dining tables, sofas and several other key product groups.

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During the period of 15th – 26th November 2018, the products with the tailored Black Friday descriptions were displayed for 61% of the ‘Black Friday’ related searches that Furniture Choice received exposure for (it’s important to note at this point that the product group bids for the Black Friday products were very similar to those for non-Black Friday products).

This allowed us to ascertain that these products didn’t receive more exposure on Black Friday related searches due purely to having higher bids.

2 – Custom labels for Black Friday ad groups

An additional tactic we implemented for Furniture Choice saw us utilise supplemental feeds to apply temporary custom labels for products in our client’s Black Friday sale. This enabled us to group all the products into a stand-alone Black Friday ad groups (see below).

By sub-categorising these products into their own ad groups we were able more accurately measure performance of these products, with more precision than if the products were spread around across their regular Shopping ad groups. This, in turn, made optimisation a much simpler over the key period.

Custom Labels

Results

Looking at the performance of these campaigns during the period of 12th – 27th November 2018, compared to an equal time-frame of 22nd October – 6th November 2018 allowed us to assess the performance of each tactic.

During the Black Friday period, we saw the following results:

  • 70% more impressions for listed products
  • 54% more clickes
  • Conversions increased by 53%
  • 59% increase in revenue

It is clear to see, in this case, that the use of a Supplemental Feed to group these products into specific ‘Black Friday’ Adgroups in order to maximise our control proved very successful for our client.