Essential information for retail businesses regarding PPC ads prior to Black Friday 2025
Preparing for Black Friday 2025: A Comprehensive PPC Strategy
As Black Friday 2025 approaches, retailers are gearing up for the busy shopping season. Here's a guide to help you create an effective PPC strategy for the event.
Start Early and Build Evergreen Campaigns
Begin testing various products, offers, creatives, and angles months before Black Friday to establish evergreen campaigns with solid daily spend. Gradually scale up ad spend in a "crescendo" fashion approaching Black Friday.
Launch Dedicated Promotional Campaigns
Create separate campaigns for Black Friday featuring the best-performing products, creatives, and offers. This allows aggressive scaling and optimal budget allocation during the peak period.
Use AI-Powered Automation (Google AI Max)
Employ Google's AI Max Performance Max campaigns that dynamically optimize ads based on real-time data such as stock levels, search trends, device type, and bidding. This helps avoid wasted spend on out-of-stock products and increases bids where opportunity is highest, especially on mobile.
Prioritize Mobile-First Assets
Since most holiday traffic is on mobile, feed search platforms vertical videos, responsive creatives, and fast-loading mobile landing pages to improve engagement and conversions.
Segment Campaigns by Funnel Stage and Geography
Separate awareness and purchase-intent campaigns with dedicated budgets and messaging, and consider geographic segmentation (e.g., targeting specific regions) for better performance and ROAS.
Optimize Landing Pages and CTAs
Use high-converting, customized landing pages aligned with ad messaging and test different call-to-actions tailored to the user’s mindset to boost conversion.
Leverage Remarketing
Re-engage visitors who didn’t convert initially with tailored ads that reference their prior interactions for increased conversion potential.
Manage Negative Keywords and Competitor Keywords Strategically
Exclude irrelevant search terms to reduce wasted spend and bid on competitor keywords to capture high-intent customers with compelling differentiators.
Measure Unit Economics and Focus on Profitability
Align PPC campaigns with business objectives by understanding unit economics to avoid guesswork and ensure steadier account growth.
Integrate AI for Real-Time Adjustments
Utilize AI-driven insights to navigate shopper behavior shifts (e.g., early deal hunting, multi-device use), ensuring ad placements and bids adapt in real-time for maximum efficiency.
These combined approaches provide a comprehensive, data-driven, and flexible PPC playbook tailored for the competitive Black Friday 2025 environment. Early preparation, AI automation, segmentation, and mobile optimization are especially critical themes emerging across expert sources.
Retailers' Black Friday Preparations
Retailers need to ensure their websites are optimized for mobile devices in time for Black Friday. Keyword research and strategy are important for Black Friday campaigns to ensure relevancy and make budgets go further. Retailers should be prepared to increase budget or allocate a separate budget for seasonal campaigns during peak periods like Black Friday.
Black Friday originated in America and is tied to the national holiday of Thanksgiving. Data shows that it is necessary to significantly increase daily and overall campaign budgets for the Black Friday period in order to stay competitive. Real-time monitoring and manual bid adjustments for top-performing keywords and ad groups are necessary for effective budget management during Black Friday.
High-quality visuals, relevant images and videos, and dynamic ads such as Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) or Auto Created Assets (ACA) can help ads stand out during Black Friday. Black Friday happens during 'The Golden Quarter', which is the final three months of the year and a crucial period for retailers.
Negative keywords can help filter out irrelevant searches and save budget during Black Friday campaigns. Sitelink extensions, promotion extensions, callout extensions, structure snippets, and other ad extensions can be used to optimize Black Friday campaigns. Globally, 60% of online purchases happen on mobile devices. Google's automated bidding strategies can be used over the weekend to leverage smart bidding for target ROAS and maximize conversion value. Budget pacing is important to make sure it lasts throughout the whole sales period and campaign lifetime.
Black Friday deals often start in October and last until the start of December. Testing headline and description assets and scaling more of what is driving the best engagement and results is recommended for generating the best results from ads.
- Retailers looking to capitalize on Black Friday 2025 should focus on optimizing their websites for mobile devices, as data indicates 60% of online purchases during the holiday season happen on mobile devices.
- In addition to mobile optimization, keyword research and strategy will be crucial for Black Friday campaigns, helping to make budgets more efficient and improve the relevancy of ads.
