Introduction

In preparation for one of the busiest times of the year, we have compiled some additional campaign best practices to help with your digital strategy during the holiday season.

• Landing page changes 
  
  It is recommended that you not make major changes to your website right before Black Friday. The week leading up to Black Friday should be spent performing quality assurance. You do not want your site crashing or expired promotions on your site. In addition, you can set up an alert in MarinOne to make sure you have tracking set up properly.
   
• Brand-term bidding
  
  For your brand terms, MarinOne allows for the targeting of an impression rate percentage (for Google) and position targeting (for non-Google publishers). 
  
  For non-Google publishers, we recommend a position range of 1.0 - 1.3, as an average of anything higher is virtually impossible and will lead to over-bidding. Brand terms usually have a significantly higher conversion rate than non-brand terms.
   
• A/B testing
  
  Perform your A/B creative tests well before Thanksgiving week to find creatives that will perform well during Black Friday weekend. Marin allows for creative A/B testing and determines winners based on your chosen KPIs. Contact your Marin account representative on how to best use dimensions to enhance your A/B creative testing across your entire account. Black Friday is not the best time to try new, untested ad copy.
   
• Refine your negative keyword list
  
  Remove unwanted spend by adding negative keywords from search query reports. Marin’s Keyword Expansion tool generates a list of negative keyword suggestions based on thresholds of impressions, clicks, and or conversions set by the user.
   
• Daily and monthly budgets
  
  Review budgets to make sure your campaigns are not constrained in anticipation of volume increases during this period. Please revisit your spend levels from the prior year for the Black Friday weekend to determine a starting point for your budgets this year. 

And as always, don’t forget to utilize our Support Center and reach out to our Customer Support team with any questions.