E-commerce during Black Week: From Omnibus compliance to preparing estimates and advertising accounts

The big sell-out holiday and the annual consumer frenzy are approaching. This year’s Black Friday will be different from the previous ones. During Black Week, one of the most profitable times of the year for the e‑commerce industry, we are facing a whole new Omnibus Directive challenge. In addition, competition is increasing every year, and it makes advertisers fight for potential customers at every turn. So how do you prepare for this intense period and maintain integrity while preparing an effective sales campaign?

Pre-Black Week activities

Google has always been striving to provide its users with top-shelf, state-of-the-art solutions.

Adaptation of the product feed to the Omnibus Directive

The introduction of the Omnibus Directive has set a new standard for promotions in the e‑commerce industry. Brands must meticulously adjust their promotional campaigns and, most importantly, their product feeds to avoid misinformation and legal problems. As explained by Mr. Tomasz Chróstny, the president of OCCP (or UOKiK in Polish):

“The concept of “a place of sale” should cover not only a physical location (e.g., a brick-and-mortar store) but also an online presence(e.g., an online store, a shopping platform). This means that online intermediaries (e.g., price comparison sites or trading platforms) are also accountable for fulfilling the obligation to inform about the lowest price used within 30 days before the discount is offered when they provide sellers with tools to present discounts. In this case, it does not matter whether they are a party to the sales contract being concluded.”1

This includes, among other things, a critical assessment of all activities based on product feeds. They must comply with the directive’s requirements, providing accurate and reliable information about products and most importantly, their price. If the price is misleadingly presented to users, it is severely penalized by the OCC. For partner sites to present price reductions to users in a way that complies with the new directive, it is necessary to introduce an additional parameter in the product feed indicating the lowest price of the last 30 days.

An example of how zakupy.avanti24.pl, a fashion comparison engine, presents its offers, using the omnibus_price parameter (which includes the lowest price from the last 30 days).

Mr. Chróstny further explains:

“Trading platforms and price comparison sites are not required to provide IT solutions to inform about a price reduction (e.g., in the form of a crossed-out price or a “-x%” annotation). However, if they decide to make such solutions available to sellers that can improve the desirability of the purchase on the platform, these tools must meet the requirements of the law. Providing solutions that make it difficult or impossible for sellers to properly present price reductions may be considered an unfair market practice.”2

The directive doesn’t apply to those publishers who promote advertisers on their site without providing tools to show price reductions.

Promotions different than usual!

Every year we face the same challenges as brand owners wonder what budget they should allocate to paid activities. Especially those in Google Ads, which are usually a significant part of the budget. In theory, we can draw conclusions. Once we’ve drilled down into our data and reviewed the results from previous years. We can also check the potential with Google Trends or keyword search, as well as build complex tables with the analysis of the results. All these things, however, take a lot of time that we are always short of, and certainly in such an intense period. Therefore, at SalesTube, we have created tools to meet your expectations and solve these problems.

Analyze query potential with the One Prophet Tool

In the SEM department, we use the One Prophet Tool. The tool allows our clients to thoroughly analyze the potential of queries for the Black Week period. Thanks to this, we can identify relevant keywords, trends and consumer behavior. What’s more, we can optimize advertising campaigns so that we can achieve our sales objectives. The One Prophet Tool uses data sourced from Google Trends and creates a predictive model based on data from even up to the last 5 years. In One Prophet, you can analyze the seasonality of given phrases in various time intervals and see how, given the historical trend, interest in Google search will evolve in the future.

Source: SalesTube Internal Tool – One Prophet

Is your account ready for increased activity?

During the Black Friday period, we spend more and create even dozens of new campaigns. This can surely lead to errors and shortcomings but also overload the advertising system. To prevent it, we use our proprietary Health Monitor Tool. The tool help us to make sure that advertising accounts are properly prepared for the increased activity during Black Week. In Health Monitor we are able to quickly analyze 59 different aspects of a Google Ads account. Moreover 6 of them also apply to a Google Merchant Center account. The report calculates a “Health Score” based on the errors and warnings found, which, in turn, determines the health of the account and gives the specialist a quick insight into things that need improvement. In addition to the visual clarity of the application itself, the user is also able to generate an Excel file. The file containing the analysis of their accounts in a clear and understandable format.

Source: SalesTube Internal Tool – Health Monitor

Source: Summary – SalesTube Internal Tool – Health Monitor

Source: SalesTube Internal Tool – Health Monitor

We are ready for more activity – what do we do next? How to effectively analyze data during Black Week and make profitable decisions?

During Black Week, it is often crucial for our clients to monitor campaign performance on a year-on-year basis.

Every Black Friday, a dedicated report helps us assess the rate of spending and the effectiveness of Google Ads activities. With the tool, you can compare the results to last year’s Black Friday. This allows specialists to react faster to possible drops in the dynamics of impressions/clicks/cost YoY.

Source: SalesTube Internal Tool – Health Monitor – report

At this point, it is also worth focusing on building your own base of users through increased marketing automation activitiy. Black Week is a great time for this in terms of customer loyalty. Basically, we should build a base of users who we can send messages to in the future. This is all the more important in the era of the upcoming Cookieless, in which a solid, well-maintained user base will be at a premium. It is therefore worth adding a newsletter sign-up on our store, preferably as a pop-up with a special follow-up offer for newsletter users, or enable sending web-push notifications.

We should remember that not everyone has to be part of the sales machine and participate in Black Week. If you want to do so, be well-prepared for it. Pay attention to the correctness of your product feeds. Prepare an estimate of potentials and check the quality of your account. These aspects allow you to achieve your goals and thus, the success of your campaign during this unique period for sales. If you are still hesitating on how to run your campaigns during this time. How to monitor them? Or simply need professional support, get back to us!