{"id":5846,"date":"2018-11-30T09:08:15","date_gmt":"2018-11-30T09:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/smarter-ecommerce.com\/blog\/en\/?p=5846"},"modified":"2018-12-13T14:00:52","modified_gmt":"2018-12-13T14:00:52","slug":"black-friday-in-europe-a-case-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smarter-ecommerce.com\/blog\/en\/ecommerce\/black-friday-in-europe-a-case-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Friday in Europe: A Case Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For retailers advertising to European markets with Google Shopping, this year\u2019s Black Friday was a dynamic one \u2013 not only because the US-born Black Friday hype is now experiencing staggering year-over-year growth in Europe, but also because the presence of comparison shopping services (CSS) brought new uncertainties<\/a> to this year\u2019s seasonal shopping boom.<\/p>\n

For merchants advertising on Google Shopping, Black Friday 2018 required double the effort as they needed to serve both their Google Shopping Europe (GSE) and their CSS campaigns.<\/p>\n

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\"Wardow-Black-Friday_Google-Trends-Data\"<\/p>\n

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As this chart derived from Google Trends<\/a> data demonstrates, search interest in Black Friday has increased significantly in the US during the ecommerce era, but still shows linear growth (which has sometimes flattened and decreased). However, in newer \u201cnon-traditional\u201d Black Friday markets like Germany, search interest is exhibiting strong exponential growth. For online shops, this extreme change is both an opportunity and a challenge: campaign structures and strategies must be resilient and adaptable to capture the maximum number of consumers while also remaining profitable. Automation is more or less necessary to deliver bidding at this kind of scale.<\/p>\n

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Wardow: a top shop facing complexity and competition<\/h3>\n

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Wardow.com<\/a> is a prestigious online retailer \u2014 selling bags, backpacks, suitcases and accessories across 12 countries. Based in Potsdam, this savvy online pure player has established significant brand power in Europe over the course of 12 years with the help of Google Shopping and other PPC channels. Plus, they now participate in the Google shopping auction using CSS campaigns in addition to standard GSE campaigns, which means more brand exposure than ever as well as access to discounted CPCs.<\/p>\n

However, even for top-notch paid search professionals like the Wardow team, managing such a high number of target countries with a twofold GSE and CSS approach<\/a> requires a lot of resources, and the complexity of this disrupted auction environment can be a real challenge. Moreover, competitors make it quite unpredictable what will happen during this very special long weekend \u2013 stretching from Black Friday through Cyber Monday \u2013 because Wardow sells goods from well-known brands like Samsonite, Kapten & Son, Fj\u00e4llR\u00e4ven, DKNY, and dozens more. Why? While these are all distinguished brands, their products nevertheless become commoditized (in other words, highly comparable) across different webshops, where price becomes one of the most important factors in the consumer\u2019s buying decision.<\/p>\n

To manage these numerous strategic and tactical challenges, automation is key to enhancing the capabilities of the paid search marketers.<\/p>\n

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Advanced PPC management with custom labels<\/h3>\n

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Wardow devised a powerful metric integrated within a custom label<\/a>, where they collect and formulate data like profitability and return rate per article and then cluster the output into ten different \u201cbusiness values\u201d (as they call this clever metric). For Black Friday, they created another custom label for all items with discounts. Together, those two labels built the basis for Advanced Bid Strategies<\/a> (ABS) within Whoop!, as we combined the business values and the on-sale items into ten different ABS.<\/p>\n

Those ten ABS were then set up for all target countries and device campaign splits<\/a>. Meanwhile, Whoop!\u2019s Bid Sync feature was active in Wardow\u2019s CSS campaigns, so the bids were cloned from the normal Google Shopping Account affected by the ABS to the CSS campaigns.<\/p>\n

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A short history of Wardow and smec:<\/h4>\n