How to Prepare Your Google Ads for Q4 (+FREE downloadable checklist)

The Ultimate Q4 Google Ads Prep Guide (and Costly Mistakes to Avoid)

Get our Ultimate Google Ads Checklist here: https://checklist.younganddigital.marketing

Q4 can make or break your year — but most advertisers go in unprepared. In this episode, Jeremy shares the 8-step Google Ads Q4 checklist he uses with every client to maximize sales, boost ROAS, and avoid the costly mistakes that waste millions each holiday season. From offer planning to bid strategy tweaks and campaign timing, this is your roadmap to a record-breaking quarter.

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Transcript

Q4 is here, and every year I see the same Google Ads mistakes which cost businesses like yours and your clients millions. The main reason for this is no preparation, no strategy, and poor execution. That's why today I will be discussing the eight steps that you need to undertake this q4 to absolutely smash it with Google ads. Let's dive right in. Welcome back to Google ads and niche guys. Hope everyone is doing absolutely fabulously and find this Monday morning. And I tell you one thing, winter is coming. It is getting cold. It is getting darker, at least in the northern half of in the northern hemisphere. So that's where most of my listeners are, as well, most of you. And of course, this can only mean one thing, q4 is around the corner. Well, it's q4 anyway, around the world, but it's just getting warmer on the other side of the world, which is weird. What was what's that about? Now, never, never thought of celebrating Christmas at a beach, but maybe I'll have to try one day anyway. Get sidetracked. I've done this episode quite a bit and quite a few times, but just want to reiterate it with a couple of more sort of nods to other episodes, and of course, with one major update that you can get this episode actually as a checklist where we're going to discuss all those steps and strategies in detail, and this is actually the q4 checklist that we swear by for all of our clients, and that we use with absolutely everyone to be as prepared as possible. You'll find the link here on the pod, and you can get it now as well. So I'll start right in and talk about what we want to be covering when you want to run the optimal Q for sale. The first step really is about everything that I do on this podcast, and that is to get the basics right. I probably in my career, have reviewed hundreds, if not 1000s, probably 1000s, of Google Ads accounts, and all of the poor ones all have the same thing in common. And it's something that I preach over and over and over again, do the basics right? They don't do the basics right? So all of the things that I talk about on this pod, a lot of times they're quite advanced strategies, because there might be people out there who want a little bit more, but something I see time and time again is people trying to turn to advanced strategies to fix basic issues in their funnel or in their offer or In the general Google Ad setup, which is not helping them grow. Okay? Because ultimately what Google wants, and I think I've told this story multiple times, is to balance their own needs and wants, right? So Google wants to, of course, users to regularly use Google ads in order to or Google in order to provide the data input into the machine and to keep consumers coming back to Google to use it more often. It wants us advertisers to pay the money, of course, and if we help Google provide relevant search results through elegant and good setup, by targeting the right people with the right ads, then we of course, win customers, and Google rewards us with lower click costs. All of that is probably can be summarized with maximizing the relevance of your ads, as long as you maximize the relevance of your ads, you will win in Google if yours is the most relevant and best search result for the search result you want your ad appear to that is how you win at this game, and you just use all of the strategies that I have mentioned in this pod multiple times. But you can, of course, always get in touch at Jeremy young and digital dot marketing, or head to the website young and digital dot marketing in order to not only find the checklist I mentioned, but of course, you can also book a call with us on how to smash it this q4 and potentially lay those foundations which are so so, so important. It's very limited spots at the moment, so I would probably get onto this ASAP. The second step is you want to plan your Google friendly offer, because q4 is the season of sales. They are so. Many sales opportunities that are going to come up now in the next few weeks, where you can test your offers and where you can maximize absolutely everything there is to come from Halloween to Singles Day, black week, or do it a black month, the Black Friday weekend, Cyber Monday, cyber week, Christmas, q5 new year sale. There's so many things that you can do make sure that you plan out your sales and make sure that you avoid four mistakes, that the offer is too complicated, that the offer has not been tested, that you that the offer doesn't have enough margin, or that the offer cannot be replicated on Google. So those are the four core mistakes that I see when people are planning sales. What I would do is just repurpose what has previously worked. If a 20% off sale has worked previously really well for you, just use that right? So Don't over complicate it to keep it really simple. K, i, s, s, keep it simple, stupid, right? Like that is the go to recommendation that I can make here. When people say I'm making the offer too complicated, what I see very often is people trying to stand out by trying to be clever, like with something, or get 30% off every third item or something like that. It doesn't work, don't do it. It's silly. If it takes more than two sentences to describe what to do, it is probably too complicated, and you shouldn't be running that self. Okay? The second cool mistake is that it's not been tested. That's why I said just repurpose what you've done previously, right? That's probably the easiest, but you also have quite a few opportunities to test it now. Yeah, Halloween, run a flash sale, single stay. There's lots of opportunities to come up to maybe pivot your strategy last minute if it doesn't work out. And the fourth third of issue that I see a lot of people make is like, the offer doesn't have enough margin. So people give like crazy discounts, 80% off something, and then they don't earn any money. And usually the new customer lifetime value of customers acquired in q4 is worse, anyway, so you're biting in your own ass there, to be honest. And it's not great. So I would be wary of that and do the maths beforehand. And lastly, that you can't replicate the offer on Google, because there's only four ways you could communicate offers, right? So through your classic strikeout price, which, by the way, is the best do that if you can, don't use discount codes. If you can avoid it, otherwise, you just use the discount code both on your ad asset and in Merchant Center, and you can also communicate this in your ads directly, right? You can use temporary headlines and descriptions to actually communicate your sale. And like I said, you can also use an ad asset for that as a promo extension. That's the only ways you can communicate sales, right? And they are pretty structured as well. So for instance, the discount code thing, you can't even do the complicated things, like the one I just mentioned, 30% off of every third item that doesn't work. You actually have to select amount of, up to an amount of or percentage off, or up to a percentage off, and that is the only way you can actually do it. So 20 to 50% off always works. Sometimes I would even do something like tiered discounts, right? So only 10% on your best sellers, up to 40% maybe on your 50% on the products that you want to get rid of. Okay, so step number three is then to test the offer. One of the biggest mistakes I've ever made, I think I've told the story a couple of times, is one of our biggest clients in 21 was running a Black Friday sale. We discussed strikeout prices, and as it turned out, that didn't work, because the they only had recently switched to Shopify the feed was relatively new, and we couldn't use strikeout prices, right? Boom. What an absolute do do that was. So plan it beforehand. Please. You've got three opportunities, Singles Day, Halloween, and you got just do a flash sale, if you have to right in order to test it. Step number four is to prepare the algorithm. So I've got two recommendations here. Recommendation one is, if you plan to have shorter sales and also have some sort of history of how high your conversion rates will be, use a feature called seasonality bid adjustments in Google, you can go to tools and settings, I think, and then to to actions. Is something else, I think it's bid strategies and then adjustments. Sorry, just trying to think of it. See the UI of my
heart and for. To me, you can navigate there and then actually go to a feature called seasonality bid adjustment, because Google doesn't understand when a Black Friday sale happens on your site or a big sale, right? So it only understands, oh, suddenly the conversion rates doubled. What's going on here. We can actually start bidding higher, and if you tell Google about this, it'll be better in adjusting to do so, yeah, so you head to Tools, and then so budgets and bidding and enter adjustments. Have a play around there. I recommend this for any sales that are shorter than two weeks. Okay, just look at maybe last year. If the conversion rate doubled in that time, you can probably tell Google that very likely the conversion rate is going to double. And so you can actually push harder and push more in your campaigns, which is cool. The alternative is, if a sale is very long, like you do black month and Christmas, just let it run as normal. You may want to lower your bid strategies slightly, like sort of adjust your ROAs target slightly, drop them me, or go even nuclear after a week or two, if everything is going well, and go to max conversions or max conversion value and let it rip. That is how you dominate. You have to trust the process and do, of course, the daily media buying in order to to monitor everything. But that is how you dominate. Then step five is adding your promotions. You want to use strikeout prices if possible, because they combine with your reviews on Google Shopping, and that is, in my opinion, the most powerful way of doing it, plus you actually are dropping the price of the product, which in turn gives you, of course, more visibility and reach right typical. So I would go with that if you can as a alternative use Merchant Center discounts, but only if you cannot avoid it. Okay, for instance, you have to use a discount code because there's no other way, really with, let's say your how to run the sale properly. Okay, you want to use your promotion assets 100% don't miss out on that. Use your brand campaign as a billboard, right? So, for instance, you want to add, during that time that you have a Black Friday sale, communicate that in your headlines and descriptions, you can use your headline description assets for that. Alternatively, what you can always do is use cool shit like countdown timers, right? That's probably something that you're not aware of. If you go into a search campaign and a search ad, you can actually open up with the with that weird bracket that you'll find on the right hand side of your Mac keyboard, across the on the same one as the normal square brackets. I don't know what it's called, but basically that triggers a functionality that you can have dynamic countdowns in your asset, in your headlines, which is really cool. You can also use it in descriptions, which is pretty dope as well. And I would also try and encourage you, if you have a certain site link or a call out to use temporary site links, or call us to highlight the Black Friday sale or the sales as as well, if you can. Then, of course, don't forget to prepare your shop. Too many people don't actually add a nice banner at the top or use a proper banner on their homepage, and it is just really, yeah, helpful to communicate the sale properly on your site and on your product pages. So important, people don't do that. They send people to a product page and then don't say that. It's actually a sale that is happening right now. Say it on your product page. Don't forget to do that. And if you're already struggling to keep up, don't forget you can head to the website. Get yourself that q4 checklist so you don't have it all written down. Then the sixth step, which I've implemented, used to be seven steps, but now it's the sixth step is to prepare demand gen campaigns. So I've done quite an extensive episode in demand gen already, but it's absolutely flying for most of our clients. I've done like a massive, massive episode of For Whom demand gen is, how to set it up, what our best practices, etc, are head back to there, but you should definitely use it for this q4 period as well, to communicate that in sale ads, step number seven is launching the sale. So like I said, drop your ROAs targets, increase the budgets, monitor daily spend. You will at that time. Don't want to build any new campaigns or do any other crazy stuff. Literally every day is media buying day. Just let it rip and make sure that you are actually on top of your media buying every single day. One bonus tip that I always like to bring in is if you have like, top five. 510, best selling products. Build a p max, assetless p max, or max conversion value, throw in the best seller products there, and just let it rip. That's usually something that I like to do as well. Then the last step is wind it down the sale. What I usually recommend is, before you start all the all the other shenanigans, is to just take a screenshot of the ad account of how it looked before you started the sale, just so that you can put the budgets back, the bid strategies back, etc, etc. And to wind it down fast, if your Black Friday sale ends, literally on the Sunday the second right then at midnight, I want you to be in that ad account, and wind down the sales, wind down the budgets, and be on top of it, because otherwise it's going to be crazy and you are going to struggle. Sorry, it's actually December, right? So it's the 30th of November. Sorry, don't know why I said second of of December, of November. Yeah, make sure that you're on top of it and wind down the sale fast. I have burnt quite a lot of money before doing it on a Monday morning and being too late. Okay, so that's what you do to prepare optimally for your sale. People over complicated. Think there's a magic button. It's all just a little bit of prep, knowing what you're going to be doing, choosing the right strategy and just execution, and you're going to be fine. And if you want more tips like that, give this podcast a follow. I would love to hear how you finding these tips. And then if they've been helping, if they're not been helping, tell me as well. Just get in touch. Jeremy young, Google ads on LinkedIn. Jeremy at young and digital dot marketing via email, I'd love to hear from you, and I love to see you in the next episode. Until then, I'm wishing you a happy and productive week ahead.