Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are make or break for retailers, with over 200 million consumers shopping in-store and online across the 2023 Thanksgiving weekend.
Per Adobe Analytics, Cyber Monday remains the biggest online shopping day of all time, with total sales climbing 7.8 percent to $38 billion last year — including peak sales of $15.7 million per minute between 10:00 – 11:00 pm Eastern.
With so much on the line, it makes sense to start planning your BFCM display ad strategy as early as possible.
To help you out, we used Adbeat’s proprietary competitive intelligence technology to identify key learnings from recent top Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, including brands like:
- Home Depot
- Pandora
- Ashley Furniture
Let’s get into it…
Home Depot: Avoid the competition with early BFCM campaigns
With consumers actively looking to buy during Cyber Week, it’s an obvious time for brands to chase new customers.
But there’s a problem: when every brand has the same idea, winning new customers becomes more expensive. For instance, one study found that the average cost per acquisition from Google Ads during BFCM climbed by 31 percent year on year to $16.79 in 2023.
We’d bet dollars to donuts that this trend is true across display ad categories like YouTube and the Google Display Network.
So, somewhat counterintuitively, our first tip is to consider shifting your display ad spend earlier in the calendar to avoid all the competition.
One brand to take this approach is Home Depot, which ran a Spring Black Friday campaign throughout April 2024:
(Incidentally, they were far from the only brand to launch an early BFCM promotion. In just a couple minutes browsing our display ad database, we noticed that both Best Buy and Wayfair ran “Black Friday in July” campaigns this year.)
Home Depot ran various iterations of this video ad, with our spending data estimating they spent $5+ million across the month-long campaign.
Each ad directed clickers toward a different landing page.
For instance, the ad we shared above pointed to a specific product page for an outdoor furniture set that appeared in the video:
Whereas other variants showcased a wider range of products and linked to a dedicated landing page incorporating all of the retailer’s top Spring Black Friday deals across its outdoors category:
Which leads us to another key learning from this same campaign (thanks, Home Depot!): always take the time to align your landing page content with your ad creative.
This way, shoppers know exactly what to expect when they click through, which means they’re more likely to buy something.
Living Spaces: Build a dedicated BFCM landing page
There’s no point investing a bunch of ad spend and creative energy into your BFCM campaign if consumers end up bouncing the second they arrive on your website.
Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that’ll happen if you just send clickers straight to your homepage (or some other generic page).
As we mentioned in the previous section, it pays to match the messaging on your ad creatives and landing pages. And one of the best ways to do this is to create a dedicated landing page for your Cyber Week campaigns.
Living Spaces clearly realizes this.
In the following video ad, the furniture retailer promotes its Black Friday event:
If you click through, you’re taken to a dedicated landing page housing all the brand’s BFCM offers:
There’s no room for confusion here: you see a Black Friday ad and you’re transported to a Black Friday landing page.
When you provide this sort of watertight user journey, consumers are more likely to stick around, browse your products, and (hopefully) make a purchase.
👉 Learn more: 8 examples of high-converting display ad and landing page combos
Pandora: Clearly state discounts in ad creative
Why do consumers shop during BFCM? Are they caught up in a collective buying frenzy?
Unsurprisingly, no. The actual reason is far more mundane, with 81 percent of shoppers saying promotions and sales are the #1 factor.
So if people are on the lookout for bargains, it makes sense to speak their language in your ad creative. Don’t force them to guess — clearly spell out the discounts you’re offering (and any other relevant details).
This is precisely what jewelry brand Pandora did in our next ad example:
It’s not hard to imagine why a shopper contemplating a jewelry purchase would be won over by the promise of up to 40 percent off their purchase.
People who click ads like this are showing high buying intent. They’ve basically already made up their mind to buy something — they just need to find the right product (at the right price). We’d say there’s a good chance this ad had a solid conversion rate.
Pandora also took the smart decision of stating the dates of its BFCM sale in the ad creative.
This isn’t just about providing useful information. It’s about building a feeling of urgency and scarcity. More on that in the next section…
Hulu: Use messaging to build urgency and scarcity
Urgency and scarcity can be a powerful motivator for consumers.
How powerful? Well, research reveals that 81 percent of “FOMO networkers” — people who have a “fear of missing out” on social media — have bought something online in the past month.
What’s more, research published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science concluded:
“Product and resource scarcity both attract the consumer’s attention [and] increase the perceived value of the items being considered.”
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all about (artificial) urgency and scarcity.
Shoppers know they only have a short period of time to take advantage of BFCM deals. So they feel compelled to click through and buy, simply because they don’t want to miss out.
After all, could you really live with yourself if you missed that juicy 15 percent discount on the combined waffle iron and toastie maker you’ve been eyeing for weeks?
Use this to your advantage by adding urgency and scarcity-related messaging to your BFCM creatives. Just like streaming platform Hulu did here:
Unless you take the time to read the small print, you don’t even know how long this offer is available for — you just know it’ll be gone soon.
Which means you’re more likely to take immediate action.
Tractor Supply Co: Use aggressive discounts to drive cross-sells
If your entire Cyber Week strategy is geared toward selling heavily discounted products, you’re doing it wrong.
Sure, you should absolutely be luring customers with attractive promotions. But the goal here isn’t just to shift a bunch of cut-price products — anyone can do that. Instead, use those sharp BFCM discounts to drive purchases of non-discounted products through upselling and cross-selling.
While the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, upsells and cross-sells are actually subtly different:
- Upsells are about recommending more expensive “premium” versions of the product a customer was originally viewing.
- Cross-sells involve encouraging shoppers to buy additional related products alongside their original purchase.
Ultimately, both help to boost sales — they just do it in different ways.
Okay, let’s look at how to cross-sell and upsell in a BFCM campaign, courtesy of Tractor Supply Co. In this video ad, the retailer shouts about a big saving on safes, while also featuring images of various other products:
Now, let’s say you clicked that ad and ended up on this product page:
Scroll down and you’ll notice that Tractor Supply Co uses this page to recommend a bunch of “similar items” at more expensive price points (only one of which is available at a discount):
Not only that, but it also features a handful of related products. Again, you’ll notice that none of them are discounted:
And if you add something to your shopping cart, the retailer suggests recommended products across various categories. Once more, the majority aren’t sale items:
This goes to show that combining effective ad creative with some smart UX can give you multiple opportunities to upsell and cross-sell to BFCM shoppers.
Which can have a massive impact on your average order value.
Ashley Furniture: Switch up your publisher strategy
There’s another key element of display ad strategy planning that we haven’t mentioned yet: choosing your publishers.
Now, you might assume it’d make sense to place your BFCM ads with the same publishers you use at any other time of year. After all, you’re targeting the same audience, right?
However, that’s not necessarily the right approach.
To explain why, let’s use Adbeat to analyze Ashley Furniture’s publisher placements. Here are their top publishers over the past six months:
As you can see, this is essentially a who’s-who of generic, high-traffic sites. Beyond Chess.com, there’s no indication of any obvious targeting strategy here.
Now, let’s take a look at one of the retailer’s 2023 BFCM ads:
Top publishers for this ad include:
- eBay
- Brad’s Deals
- OfferUp
All of which are specifically geared toward shopping — with a particular focus on bargain-hunting. In other words, exactly the type of people you’d expect to be interested in a Black Friday sale.
What does this tell us?
During Cyber Week, it’s time to ditch the brand awareness campaigns in favor of low-hanging fruit. Target shoppers at the bottom of the funnel and use your most attractive offers to lure them to your store.
Conclusion: Remember your brand and audience
BFCM might require a major shift in your creatives, messaging, and publishers.
But you should still be targeting the same audience.
After all, Cyber Week is only seven days. Once your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns finish, you want the customers who snapped up your special offers to come back and buy from you again.
That’s not going to happen if you abandon your value proposition in favor of bagging some quick sales.
Want to tap into data like this? You can with Adbeat! Request your live Adbeat demo here.