Cyber Monday 2021 sales are expected to be big like it has been in the past years and ecommerce businesses should prepare to be part of this huge sales opportunity.

Cyber Monday became one of the biggest ecommerce events back in 2005 in the United States, on the first Monday immediately after Thanksgiving Day when retailers noticed a spike in shopping sales. 

When is Cyber Monday 2021?

This year Cyber Monday falls on November 29^th, which means only a few weeks left to prepare your shopping ads campaigns deals and promotions. You’ll need to be sharp and ready to maximise the conversion from an influx of online customers poised to grab a deal.

Why join the Cyber Monday hype?

In the UK, 77% of Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals transactions happen online. In-store crowds have significantly dropped and online shopping is set to become the main shopping channel in the near future.

Pre-sale research is also mainly done by shoppers online, as a good 51% of UK shoppers are reported to research for deals before the sales even start.

Sales across the year don’t come close to the potential of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday 2020, it was predicted that brits were set to spend £6bn on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

So, Paid Marketers need to have a clear strategy in place if they want to make the most of Cyber Monday.

Here at Shoptimised, we’ve worked our fair share of Cyber Monday, Black Friday and other peak shopping sales dates, and we’re now able to share our knowledge and expertise to help ecommerce businesses sell more products online.

Here are 3 important tips on how to increase conversions and smash your google shopping ads on this busy day.

1.   Define your Cyber Monday objectives and Budget

The competition on Cyber Monday is ruthless, to say the least, with hundreds of brands trying their best shopping ads strategies to boost their visibility on searches and increase online sales.

This means that you might have to increase or reduce your shopping ads spend as you go.

Here’s an example scenario: you earmark a £5000 paid ad spend on Cyber Monday and over Cyber Week and are aiming for an 800% ROAS, but on day one of Black Friday and even before Cyber Monday is on, you realise you’ve maxed your budget. What do you do? What are you allowed to do?

When planning your campaigns and shopping ads ahead of Cyber Monday, make sure there is room for flexibility. We recommend setting a 10-20% increase in your overall budget from last year’s.

As a retailer, it’s essential that you learn about spending rules before you dive into any promotional period. The budget you’ll need depends on your objectives: are you looking to improve ROI, make the most of the traffic or maximise return on ad spend (ROAS)?

So, back to our scenario, you need to increase budgets to ensure that you’re making the absolute most of the flurry of potential buyers. Remember, humans can be fickle, so if you’re not making the most of shoppers' attention to purchase, your competitors will be.

2.   Create a sense of urgency with shopping ads

When it comes to and Cyber Monday, urgency is inevitably part of the game, because the promotions and deals you offer to shoppers only stretch for that day only or week if you’re doing Cyber Week promotions.

Build a sense of urgency by adding promotion extensions, offer countdowns and inventory counters.

Promotion extensions can be as simple as a ‘Cyber Monday’ or ‘Cyber Week’ sticker on the product image, and you can include the end dates for a deal.

Countdowns allow you to break up promotions and work to timescales that suit your targets. For example, you can add a countdown timer to promote a 40% discount offer that ends at 5 pm, meanwhile, another promotion on the same item might run until midnight, at a lower discount rate.

Inventory counters are good to prompt shoppers, encouraging them to get the items they are eyeing while it’s still in stock. Showing your stock levels on promotions, particularly deals that are performing well, will further boost user interest. Just make sure you have backup promotions to ‘take over’ once the item is out of stock.

Free delivery also attracts users to your shopping ad. If you’re going to offer free delivery, state it clearly on all the shopping ads as well as your website.

3. Organisation and feed optimisation

A busy day like Cyber Monday requires good organisation. Make sure you start working on your shopping ads early, finalise all promotions and ensure they get approved by google at least 1 week in advance to allow enough time to fix any potential issues or disapprovals. Start the optimisation process with the GTINs, Titles and Descriptions as they are crucial for the best performing shopping ads.

Optimising your product feed can be a rather long process but if done correctly, it will increase your product reach with more clicks and impressions that ultimately play an active role in increasing your ROAS.

Check our fully managed service and let us do the time-consuming job for you.

If you never thought of these tips as essential for your shopping campaigns on Cyber Monday, then we don’t want you to miss out on next year's too. Contact us for a free trial of the Shoptimised software today.

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