8 Tricks to Ace Your Black Friday Facebook Ads Campaign

Black Friday is undeniably one of the biggest days in retail. With consumers spending and willing to spend billions of dollars every year, we can’t deny how big of an opportunity this is for brands and businesses.

But the competition for ad space is at its peak during this time of year.

Everyone ramps up their advertising budget and marketing strategy to attract consumers, which is an obvious move to secure sales and close the year with solid profits. So, if you want a slice of this Black Friday cake, you must step up your game.

Just how big is Black Friday?

Just to give you a ballpark, during Black Friday 2020 shoppers spent $9 billion online. That’s how big it is.

The number of people shopping online increases every year, and that says a lot about the future of online shopping with or without the pandemic! So, it’s time to get on with strategizing your way into your customers’ carts with your Black Friday Facebook ads.

Tip #1: Build up your traffic before BFCM

Black Friday traffic and sales won’t magically come in without building up your re-engagement and retargeting audiences in advance. These are audiences you can warm up and target for your best Black Friday promotions, which include people who are highly likely to convert based on their engagements with your brand (e.g., website visits, ad and post engagements).

So, what are re-engagement and retargeting audiences?

‍Re-engagement audiences are people who interacted with your business through watching your videos or engaging with an ad but haven’t visited your website yet. Retargeting audiences are people who already visited your website after interacting with your brand through videos, ads, social media posts, and organic Google searches.

In addition to these kinds of audiences, you should also build an email list. Email lists are built by offering your website visitors a newsletter, an eBook, a webinar subscription, or discounts. For example, you can offer them these value pieces using lead generation campaigns on Facebook or exit popups on your website.

These audiences will get most of your ad spend during November’s BFCM weekend. There are two main reasons for that: Maximizing profits by investing in warmer audiences and avoiding the extremely strong competition over acquisition audiences at this time of the year.

The rise in Facebook CPM around Black Friday best reflects the increase in competition at this time. Here’s a graph we have produced using anonymous user data from thousands of Facebook ad accounts to calculate the average Facebook CPMs in different industries around BFCM 2020.

It’s important to remember that when advertising costs are rising, taking action ahead of time pays off. You don’t have to compete as hard for acquisition audiences because you’ve already warmed up audiences to target during BFCM.

Tip #2: Know who to target during Black Friday

After building up your traffic in advance, you’re thinking, “Who should see my ads on Black Friday itself?”

Two things we're certain about is that there’s fierce competition and high advertising costs during this time of the year, and being religious with targeting won’t help you survive those two.

That’s why you’ll warm up and target re-engagement and retargeting audiences you built traffic for weeks before Black Friday. They’ve already expressed interest in your brand, and that’s a good thing for your Black Friday Facebook ads. Here are a few good examples for audiences you should target:

• Email list
• Users who added items to their carts
• Facebook and Instagram post engagers
• Ad engagers and video viewers

However, you shouldn’t confine yourself to the audiences above. There are also acquisition audiences created as lookalikes from these retargeting and re-engagement audiences:

• Your buyers from the previous Black Friday
• Purchasers from the last 30, 60, 90, or 180 days
• Ad engagers

To further optimize your acquisition audiences, you can narrow down these lookalike audiences with interests.

Looking to use a less expensive method to reach people in your email list? Utilize email marketing. It’s a strong and more personalized way to lead customers to your Black Friday offers without the CPM price tag.

Tip #3: Accept and adapt to iOS 14

January 2021 saw marketers and developers all over the globe panic over Apple’s iOS 14 update that comes with a new privacy protection framework called AppTrackingTransparency. This gives Apple users the option to opt-in and out of tracking across apps and websites and prevent having their data collected and stored.

Since this was implemented despite less than positive comments from ad platforms like Facebook, advertisers had no choice but to accept and adapt to iOS 14.

Now that we’re here with the update, we’ve come to realize that relying on CRM data, Conversions API, and other tools are there to keep us afloat. So, how do we utilize these available tools?

CRM data is data collected through consumer-initiated interactions with your business such as sign-ups, messages from communication channels, social media connections, surveys, help desk calls, purchases, and others.

Utilizing CRM data is an accurate way to figure out who your customers are, which you can use to create lookalikes and find new interests to target using information handed to you by your customers.

But CRM data won’t bring back what you lost because of iOS 14. It’s not the same as your usual pixel-tracked data fed to Facebook for better ad performance analysis and audience segmentation.

Facebook Conversions API

Don’t worry, CRM isn’t your only weapon. Facebook has Conversions API (CAPI), which allows you to track a limited number of actions taken by your website visitors and feeds the information to Facebook from your website’s server. The information, however, is still limited.

That’s why when using CAPI, it’s important to optimize for the best results based on what data your business needs.

Another thing you can do to adapt is to add UTM parameters to your URLs and track your conversion rate with web analytics platforms like Google Analytics. You’ll see the number of conversions based on the conversion goal set of your campaigns and find out which ones are generating conversions and the ineffective ones.

While being data-driven is a good way to go about creating and running successful campaigns, you have to keep in mind that data is only part of what will get your ROAS up.

In times of missing data, the importance of great storytelling using high-quality creatives will set your Black Friday Facebook ads up for success.

Tip #4: Make your creatives stand out

When data is scarce, your creatives will be your best shot at converting your audiences on Black Friday. If there’s one thing good about what iOS 14 brought, it’s the strengthened emphasis it gave to ad creatives.

Creatives are your brand’s way of telling its story -- your way of visualizing the solution you can provide to your customers. Promoting how your brand solves your customers’ problems instead of the products themselves is a good way to attract them.

During Black Friday, you’ll be competing with other brands for attention, and you’d want to stand out by being the best solution people are looking for. Just remember: be clear, get to the point fast, and offer your Black Friday deals.

Aside from painting your brand as the answer, it’ll also help to advise consumers about free shipping, discounts, and free gift promos. Is there a consumer who doesn’t like free shipping and discounts? No! So make sure your free shipping offers and discounts are visible to make your products more attractive.

Other than being the solution, try to resonate with their psychology during close and upcoming holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Creatives that show gift box unpacking and gift-giving is a way to awaken the spirit of buying gifts, which can work wonders for your business.

To conclude this section, be clear about your brand, being the solution, and resonate with things that make your consumers tick.

Creatives aren’t all about crystal clear images, they’re about the message they deliver to people.

Tip #5: Reform your formats

Though competition brings out bright ideas. To win over customers, you have to come up with creative ways to get their attention.When it comes to ad formats, you can experiment and come up with fresh and thumb-stopping advertisements. If you’ve always been a single-image type of advertiser, it’s time to walk new paths:

• Video ads: Did you know that in 2020, 9 out of 10 video content viewers said they want to see more videos from brands and businesses? That’s no wonder, since video ads grab attention immediately, increase ad engagement and brand awareness, and drive more conversions. If you’ve never tried video ads before, there’s no better time to try them than the weeks leading up to BFCM!
• Carousel ads: They allow you to promote a few products at a time and attract different audiences using the same ad. Moreover, these ads help you tell a story and drive more clicks, as people get curious and scroll through the different images on your ad.
• Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs): These ads allow you to show your website visitors the exact item they viewed or even left in their abandoned carts. These ads can be a reminder for them to checkout and complete the purchase.

Pro Tip: Every format and placement has its size and design specs, so make sure your ads comply with Facebook’s requirements.

Just like how you don’t want to skimp on your targeting, exploring new formats foreign to your brand is always a good way to get consumers’ attention. It’s a special time for advertising. Anyone who sees your new formats will be curious, and their curiosity will lead them to your website.

Tip #6: Deal with delivery issues

The two most obvious challenges you’ll face while running your Black Friday Facebook ads campaign are limited delivery and increased advertising costs.

With so many advertisers wanting to show their Black Friday Facebook ads to the same audience segments, it becomes more and more expensive for advertisers to deliver to their desired audience.

So, what can you do to reach your customers? Accelerate your ad delivery with manual bidding.

Accelerate the delivery of your Black Friday Facebook ads

With accelerated delivery, Facebook gives you the chance to get your ads shown because it uses the full budget as fast as possible while considering your bid.

Note that because you’re optimizing at the ad set level, this delivery type is unavailable for CBO campaigns.

When using accelerated delivery, you’re required to set a bid cap. The logic behind this is pretty clear: Facebook wants some instructions on how to spend your budget. This helps you avoid paying higher costs for results while the Facebook algorithm delivers your ads more often.

To further protect your budget while delivering faster, you can set automation rules on Facebook. Select the asset and click on Rules. From there you can create, apply, view, or manage automation rules.

For example, you want to Create A New Rule that pauses underperforming ads. Set a performance floor (e.g. website purchase ROAS < 1) to trigger the pause, select a time period for the rule to check, and schedule.

Active ads that meet the conditions will automatically pause. You can filter campaigns by adding keywords such as “purchase” to make sure the rule only applies to them.

I’ll let you in on a little secret -- Madgicx’s Automation Tactics. It offers real-time ad optimization tactics based on performance trends, letting you maximize profit and cut losses. Have other automation tactics in mind? Set custom rules in the app.

All automation tactics are customizable based on your needs, which makes the tool a powerful one to use for your Black Friday Facebook ads to scale your trending ad sets and avoid overspending. Babysitting your ad account doesn’t sound like a must now.

Tip #7: Check your spending limit

BFCM is the time for every advertiser to go all out on spending ad money. You’ll run more ad sets, target more audiences, and accelerate your ad delivery to make sure your customers see what you have in store for them.

All that requires you to remove whatever spending limit you set for your ad account. Why should you do this and risk overspending? When your ad account reaches its set limit, every ad you’re running under it will pause -- even if your credit card can handle the amount required to run all Black Friday Facebook ads under your account. They’ll only run if you remove or increase the limit.

To make sure your ads don’t stop running amid BFCM chaos, check your ad account's spending limit by clicking on All Tools (under the Business Home icon) >Billing > Payment Settings (on the top right-hand side on the Billing page).

Once you’re in the Payment Settings tab, scroll down to Account Spending Limit and see if you have an amount set. Since it’s time to spend ad dollars, it will be wise to remove any spending limit to maximize the BFCM craze within consumers and keep your ads running.

But I’d like to remind you that while you’re letting your ads run without budget limitations, it’s important that you use automation to prevent underperforming ad sets from wasting your ad dollars and allow you to scale the ones that are performing well.

Tip #8: Scale your Black Friday Facebook ads aggressively

We’ve reached the final topic - your ad budget. How can you optimally plan your holiday advertising budget?

I would start with a large number of audiences and allocate a minimum budget for each one of them. Risk management is crucial in times of high CPM and ad spends, so you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. That’s why you should start with diverse audiences.

Regarding the minimal budget, it should be at least as high as your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). For instance, if your average cost for a single acquisition in your test campaigns before BFCM was $20, that’s what your minimum budget for each ad set should be.

Then, when you want to scale a profitable audience, keep this rule of thumb in mind: always increase by at least {1 x your CPA}. Meaning, if your CPA is $20, scale aggressively to $40 in the next step.

Now you’re probably asking yourself, isn’t this too much?

But think about it - if your CPA is $20 and you scale by $10, for example, you might risk paying $30 for a single acquisition. So, let’s minimize that risk, shall we?

And anyway, CPMs and CPCs are going to be higher during BFCM, so that’s exactly the time to be aggressive.

When is the time to downscale?

Since we’re talking about spending here, I’d like to remind you that you can just push money out during and after BFCM. Once the hype dies down, it’s important to decrease your BFCM ad budgets aggressively. Why? You need to set the momentum for your Christmas holiday marketing. It’s the time when people will feel generous, and you’d want to capitalize on that.

The time to downscale also depends on how your ads are performing. If you’re running one or two that aren’t meeting your performance parameters, don’t sit around and watch them bleed more money out! Pause them as soon as you see negative trends and focus on scaling your top performers.

Easily calculate your budget

Use our FREE Facebook Ad Cost Calculator to know how much you need to spend to reach your revenue goal on Black Friday!

The calculator will also help you find out your breakeven ROAS and allocate your budget between acquisition, retargeting, and retention campaigns.

Examples of Black Friday Facebook ads

1. Black Rooster Audio

In this Black Rooster Audio Black Friday Facebook ad, which they ran last year, we see an ad that’s direct to the point. They tell you that you can get up to 90% off all your plug-in and bundle purchases and don’t miss out on giving you a sense of urgency with the phrase, “For A Limited Time Only.”

2. Whiteknuckler Brand

This Black Friday promotion from Whiteknuckler Brand is also one you can take notes from. They have a clear but short message about their Black Friday sale coming with site-wide discounts and FREE SHIPPING, which are two consumer magnets!

If you’re not aware of what Whiteknuckler Brand sells, you wouldn’t feel lost because the creative has their main products in it. This helps if you’ve been looking for similar products.

3. The Mellow Dog

If you like watching dog videos or looking at their adorable photos, you’ll surely pause to look at this one. Aside from it appealing to dog lovers, it also utilizes UGC, which is a good way to prove a brand’s legitimacy and how the customers feel about their products.

There’s the clear and short messaging we’re looking for, and the discount and free shipping offers we all love. On top of that, they have added landing page links in the primary text to increase the CTR and a sense of urgency emphasized by bold text and a bright-colored emoji.

Wrapping up

Now you’re more than ready to launch your Black Friday Facebook ad campaigns.

Remember to start preparing early to build and warm up your audiences. Don’t be religious about your target audience because everyone likes a good discount. Mix up your creatives to catch attention, and make sure your best deals are appealing.

While you’re curating your creatives, be straightforward with your storytelling, and don’t get lost in it! You’d want every cent you spend on reaching your Black Friday customers to count.While you’re having your Black Friday Facebook ads delivered at faster and more expensive speeds, make sure to monitor your ad account and use automation tools.

And now, do some meditation to relax before all the fun starts and the countdown begins.

via GIPHY

Thank you for reading, and I wish you a successful Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend.