SSA #045: Facebook Ads For Black Friday

Read Time: 3 Minutes 

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday weekend just around the corner (24th - 27th November), I thought you might find it helpful to know how I'm going to be running Facebook Ads.

And so, here's what I'm going to share with you today:

– Campaign Structure

– Ad Examples

– Strategy

For us, we're going to be sending traffic from Facebook Ads to Lori's Shopify Store, but I would use exactly the same approach if you're sending readers to your books on Amazon.

And with that, let's dive into things...

The Strategy

If you're familiar with my Facebook Ads Strategy, (which I share inside Jumpstart Facebook Ads For Authors), you'll know that I put a lot of emphasis on testing Ad Creative – because that's what will determine your success.

But with a 4-day event, such as the BFCM (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) Weekend, we have zero time for testing.

We need to go headfirst into the event with some great Ads.

Now, what we think are great Ads and what Facebook thinks are great Ads are two very different things.

So, yes, we are going to be winging it a little bit here, but we can improve our chances of success by increasing our luck surface area (more on this to come).

Stick with me, as I know it sounds like I'm flying by the seat of my pants here.

But trust me, my Facebook Ads Coach uses this strategy, and he will be spending millions of dollars over the BFCM Weekend for his clients.

Here's what we're going to be doing:

– Choosing ONE product to advertise (in our case, it's a 5 book Box Set)

– Sending people from Facebook Ads to a special BFCM Landing Page on Shopify

– Analyzing previous Ads to see which messaging and imagery has worked well in the past

– Creating 4-6 Ads for this product (including scarcity and price/savings in the images and copy)

I embrace simplicity in every aspect of my life, as much as I can, and this strategy is very simple, as is the Campaign Structure, as we'll move on to now.

Campaign Structure

My standard Campaign Structure uses ONE Campaign for testing and scaling.

For this BFCM Event, I'm going to continue spending money on the Campaign that is currently running, but I'll be launching a new BFCM Campaign to run alongside it.

And within this BFCM Campaign, I'm going to have:

– 1 Ad Set

– 4-6 Ads within that Ad Set

That is it.

Nothing fancy. Nothing complex. Nothing complicated.

I alluded to luck surface area a few moments ago, and this is how I'm going to be increasing it: by creating multiple (4-6) individual Ads, based on analysis of previous winning Ads.

And I'll be letting Facebook decide which Ad(s) to spend the budget on.

It may spend 80% (or more) on just 1 or 2 Ads, and that's ok; I'm leaving it in the hands of the algorithm.

I'm not using Dynamic Creative here, which is my usual method for testing Ad Creative. We just don't have the time for the Facebook algorithm to test Dynamic Creative with an event such as BFCM.

Here's what this Ad Set looks like in action (keep in mind that I'm still building the Ads):

And this is the ONE Ad Set I have (containing the 6 Ads above) in my BFCM Campaign:

I would recommend having no more than 6 Ads in this Ad Set, as, even with a budget of $1,000's per day, you're going to be asking the algorithm to do too much.

Ad Examples

I'm still working on the Ad Creative for the BFCM Weekend, so currently, I've only created images that contain the Box Set, along with some text about the discount, the price and the deadline. Here are a couple of examples:

I'm going to be doing some more work in Photoshop over the next week or so, to see if I can improve these images, and potentially create a few images without the Box Set mock-up, just to throw into the mix.

I'm yet to think about the messaging for the Ads, and write the Primary Text and Headlines to match; so still plenty of work to be done.

But once I launch this BFCM Campaign, I'll just let it run.

I'll likely increase the budget each day by 10% - 20%, but that's all I'm going to do. I'll be leaving it in the capable hands of the Facebook algorithm.

On top of the Facebook Ads, we'll also be emailing our email list (only those who haven't bought anything from the store before), to let them know about this Box Set deal.

Wrapping Up

And that's all we're doing for Black Friday:

– One Product

– One Landing Page

– One Facebook Ads Campaign

– One Ad Set (Containing 4-6 Ads)

– 2-4 emails to the email list over BFCM Weekend

Simplicity scales (and is much less of a headache too).

Hopefully, this has given you some food for thought for your own Facebook Ads for BFCM Weekend.

Before I sign off and leave you to your weekend... it's perfectly ok NOT to run any BFCM deals on your books. It's certainly not mandatory; you are in full control.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you again next weekend.

To Your Success
– Matt