eCom Unity #8 - Maximising Peak Season Performance

Deep-Dive | Google Intraday Bidding For Peak Seasons

The Google Ads algorithm isn’t great at adjusting to short, high-scale periods.

So, if you want to maximize performance e.g. during the upcoming Black Week, you’ll need to take steps to keep the algorithm from getting in your way.

How?

By doing Seasonal Bid Adjustments in Google.

That’s what I talked about with Simon from Touchpoint during one of our eCom Unity workshops last week, where he shared some Google Ads knowledge bombs.

Let’s give you a bit more background on why this is needed.

When using target ROAS, Google’s algorithm evaluates the performance of a campaign/ad based on the performance over the last 30 days.

Therefore it is bad at responding to short-term changes in purchasing behaviour.

Like during Black Friday, when conversion rates often go up 100-200%.

Therefore, Google is not spending as much as it could while staying within the target ROAS.

Which in turn means that you are missing out on a large amount of sales.

That’s where seasonal bid adjustments come in.

These are inputs that you give to Google in their Intraday Bidding tool where you will flat out tell out:

Assume that the conversion rate is going up by 120% and you spend the budget accordingly.

This allows you to increase spend significantly from one day to another and thereby maximize performance.

A few things are important when using intraday bidding:

#1 Don’t set and forget

The increase you are entering is obviously a best guess of what will happen.

Therefore you need to monitor the performance closely and make ad hoc adjustments where needed.

Simon and his team are using Klar for 22 of their customers to closely monitor performance and find the profitability sweet spot.

#2 Think about setting different targets per campaign

Different campaigns might behave differently during BFCM. But that’s not an issue.

You can set up separate bid adjustments for different campaigns (or go even more granular if need be).

#3 Down boost after the sale event

As explained initially, Google’s algorithm uses the last 30 days to judge performance and spends accordingly.

An increased performance during Black Friday (where you leveraged bid adjustments) will count towards this.

So to get spending back down to the same level you had before the sales event, you probably will have to use negative bid adjustments to get there quicker and avoid overspending.

If you want to go deeper into this, watch the full recording of the workshop here: 👇🏼

First Results

We actually saw first results for one of the attendees of the workshop with Simon.

He reached out to me on Monday.

On the weekend, he leveraged these bid adjustments for his special sale event.

And reached record sales numbers never seen before. Great job.

More Workshops | A/B Testing

Yesterday’s workshop with Samu Hess from Touchpoint was all about A/B testing strategies, that are especially suited for special sale events.

What we’ve been covering:

• The psychology behind Black Friday and loss aversion as the main principle

• Several A/B tests and variations to push sales by promoting discounts and creating urgency

• How to minimize the risks that such tests potentially entail

Something you also might want to leverage this Black Friday.

You can watch the full recording here: A/B Testing Workshop Recording

Thank you for reading :)

I am on a mission to help eCom brands build better, more profitable businesses. If you missed any past issues, you can catch up on all of them here.

I have built one 8-figure and one 9-figure eCom brand in the past and with Klar, I work with over 700 eCom brands today.

If you have specific questions you would like me to cover next, just reply to this email.

Have a great week.

Max ✌️

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