Google has quietly introduced a new behaviour on its home page: users can now upload a file or image directly into the main search bar, and instead of opening a standard results page or Google Lens, they are taken straight into AI Mode. It is a small visual change with a significant implication. The experience users see after uploading something is no longer the familiar list of search results but Google’s expanding AI driven interface.

What is AI Mode in Google

AI Mode is Google’s more conversational and generative search experience. Instead of showing a list of traditional links, AI Mode uses Google’s Gemini model to produce direct answers, summaries and recommendations. Users can then refine their query within a chat style interface.

The core idea is that Google handles more of the thinking for the user. Rather than searching through multiple webpages, AI Mode interprets intent and provides a single structured response. This makes the experience faster for users but offers fewer opportunities for websites to receive clicks.

A subtle update that changes user journeys

Previously, uploading an image through Google would trigger Google Lens or a traditional image search. The new upload button routes people directly into AI Mode. This reflects a wider pattern. Google has increasingly been guiding searchers towards AI Mode in multiple parts of its ecosystem. Examples include AI Overviews appearing more frequently, the AI Mode tab becoming more prominent, and even the Chrome address bar offering AI Mode as a pathway.

Although Google once stated that AI Mode would not become the default search experience, its product decisions suggest the opposite direction. Every new feature seems to reinforce AI Mode as the primary interface for search, discovery and query resolution.

Why this matters for digital marketers

For marketers, the shift brings real consequences. AI Mode does not behave like a standard results page. Users see fewer traditional links, and click-through rates are lower. The journey is more conversational and less oriented toward visiting websites.

This means brand visibility inside AI Mode becomes increasingly important. Marketers need to understand:

• How their brand or content is being cited within AI Mode
• Whether their site is referenced at all
• How rankings differ from traditional search

The performance you see in classic SERPs may not translate into this new environment. AI Mode often answers a query directly without sending users away, which makes measurement and optimisation more complex.

Preparing for an AI first search landscape

Although the shift is gradual, the direction is clear. Google is shaping a search experience where AI Mode plays a central role. Digital marketers will need to adapt strategies to ensure visibility in both traditional results and AI generated responses.

Checking your presence in AI Mode should now be a routine part of search monitoring. As this becomes a bigger part of how people search, early understanding will give brands an advantage while others wait for the shift to become impossible to ignore.

Google is quietly testing a new feature inside Google Ads called Website Optimiser, and it’s already capturing the attention of performance marketers. While the tool isn’t widely available yet, early indications suggest Google is preparing to bring website testing and optimisation back into its ecosystem, something advertisers have been missing since the phase-out of earlier tools. If launched broadly, Website Optimiser could give marketers a more streamlined, data-driven way to improve landing page performance without relying on external platforms.

A Modern Take on a Familiar Concept

For seasoned marketers, the name “Website Optimiser” may feel like a throwback. Years ago, Google offered a tool by the same name that eventually evolved into Google Optimise. With Optimise discontinued, many teams lost a simple, native way to run controlled experiments. This new iteration appears to reintroduce that capability, but in a more integrated form. Placing the tool directly inside Google Ads and potentially automating some setup steps, suggests a focus on ease of use and faster activation.

Why This Matters for Advertisers

If Website Optimiser performs as expected, advertisers could benefit from a centralised, more efficient workflow. Testing landing pages, user experiences, and conversion paths directly inside Google Ads would reduce technical barriers and help teams iterate more quickly. It also has the potential to give marketers a clearer view of performance by connecting ad data and on-site behaviour within a single environment. Ultimately, that means better insights, smarter optimisation decisions, and the ability to increase ROI without adding more tools to the stack.

What Marketers Should Watch For

While excitement is building, key details are still unknown, including how flexible the testing options will be and how soon they will roll out. Even so, the appearance of this feature signals Google’s renewed commitment to supporting experimentation. For marketing teams focused on continuous improvement, Website Optimiser could soon become a valuable tool in the arsenal. Keeping an eye on updates now will ensure you’re ready to take advantage of it as soon as it becomes available.

What is colour psychology?

Colour psychology refers to the subconscious reactions our bodies and minds have to certain colours. These responses are incredibly useful to understand when designing a website to promote a behaviour (to buy a product or service).

Does colour psychology impact user experiences on websites?

Colour plays a key role in our day-to-day life; we may not realise the true impact it can have on the brain, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Your brand colours inform the way customers perceive your business.

Colour can often influence:

• The way customers interact with a brand subconsciously influencing their behaviours and responses.
• Becomes an identifying feature for businesses, think of McDonald’s with their stark red and golden yellow arches. These iconic colour palettes become synonymous with the brand.
• It can be a great tool for demonstrating different product variations. Colour can be useful for showing a whole range of products. A common example of this is with haircare products, using different colours for different hair types for easy identification

Do certain colours lead to more conversions?

Absolutely, colours convert, especially when properly picked and placed in contrast to brand colours. We’ve created a wheel showing examples of great colours for converting, and poor ones.

The key to conversions is contrast and urgency; colours like red and green are particularly effective at doing so. Red is great at provoking a feeling of urgency; it is attention-grabbing and often associated with dangers or warnings. Which can then help to draw the eye to the call to action.

Whilst green is known as being a reliable colour, it often creates a sense of trust and reliability for the customer. Whilst it doesn’t work to create a sense of urgency, its vibrancy works to pull the focus, which is particularly effective for a converting button.

How to pick the right colours for your business’s brand?

Picking the right colour palette for your brand can be tricky, but there are a couple of ways you can establish the most appropriate colour palette for your brand.

1. Undertake competitor research, look at if there are patterns are repetitions in terms of colourways being used.
2. Identify the type of feeling you want your brand to create for customers, then look at colours that are associated with that.
3. Start with the primary colour in your palette; this can really influence the remaining colours. Picking complementary shades for subtle but aesthetic outcomes or contrasting colours for visual impact.
4. Test out palettes on a test site and with asset mock-ups. Visualisations allow you to definitively identify what does and does not work.
5. Find balance in your colour palette. Whilst bold is great, make sure your content is accessible and legible. Sometimes dark and vibrant colour palettes can impact the customer’s ability to read, which then creates a poor experience.

Final Thoughts: Using Colour Intentionally to Drive Conversions

Colour isn’t just a visual accessory; it’s a powerful psychological tool that shapes how users feel, behave, and make decisions on your website. By understanding the emotional influence of colour and applying it with purpose, you can guide your audience toward the actions that matter most to your business.

Whether you’re aiming to build trust, spark urgency, or create a seamless user experience, the right palette can elevate your brand and strengthen your conversion strategy. Take the time to experiment, test, and refine your colour choices. With thoughtful application and consistent evaluation, colour can become one of your most effective assets in turning visitors into loyal customers.

WordPress is the most used Content Management System, hosting over 43% of websites on the internet. Despite users having all the tools available to implement SEO successfully at their fingertips, Ahrefs recently released a study that showed 96.55% of pages get zero organic search traffic from Google. This highlights that while there is a broad knowledge of SEO within the online community, its implementation for most sites leaves something to be desired.

Now you may be wondering, How do I know if my site is SEO-friendly? Well, you’re in luck as this article will cover features to look out for on your site to optimise and tools you can use to help with this.

Tools

Google Search Console

There are many tools you can use to check the SEO effectiveness of your site, some of them free and some of them paid. Google Search Console is one of the most important tools that you can use to track SEO performance. Search Console is a free platform offered by Google which allows users to monitor and adjust their presence in Google’s Search Results. One of Search Console’s most important features is that it allows you to monitor if your pages have been indexed in Google; if not, you can submit them for indexation. It also allows you to submit a sitemap (a map displaying your site structure) so Google can easily crawl and index your site to improve SEO performance.

Page Speed Insights

Page Speed Insights is another free tool offered by Google. With this tool, users can submit specific pages on their site for a speed performance analysis, which will also give actionable insights into specific tasks they can do to improve page speed performance over time. This is a key metric for SEO performance, and understanding if your pages are performing to Google speed requirements helps with understanding the SEO friendliness of your site.

SEMRush | SERanking

SemRush and SERanking are just two examples of many SEO all-around platforms that give you key insights into the SEO Performance of your site. With these SEO tools, you can analyse your keyword rankings, analyse content, run technical SEO audits and more. This allows you to always know if your site is SEO optimised and constantly enables you to make tweaks and improvements.

Content

When making sure your site’s SEO performance is doing well, one of the first and most important aspects you need to look out for is making sure your content is optimised for search engines. This includes making sure your titles, description and headings are concise and include your target keywords, while your images are also the right size, format and accessible.

Most importantly, you need to make sure your content is relevant to your audience and contains insightful, new information for your audience that is both relevant and authoritative to appear higher on search engines.

Technical

The technical aspect of SEO is an important step for a fully optimised website. You can use an SEO tool such as SERanking or SEMRush to crawl your site and identify issues such as broken page links, redirecting pages, site speed and image sizes. These tools will give you tips and recommended fixes to allow you to improve the SEO and UX of your site, increasing performance.

Making sure you understand the different aspects of SEO performance to track and the tools you can use to help you improve performance are both beneficial and worthwhile to your website and overall business strategy in the long run. It is imperative for businesses in the future that they understand the fundamentals of SEO performance and how they can implement them.

When optimising a web page, titles and descriptions are two of the most fundamental elements for improving SEO and boosting performance. Titles themselves are a ranking factor, which means search engines, such as Google, will analyse your titles and their relevance to your content and the audience before deciding where they rank. Google does not use descriptions to determine where you rank, but they are still important for improving click-through-rate (CTR), the number of customers that see your webpage versus the number that click on it.

Updating titles and descriptions can often be a lengthy process, as some sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages, so going into each web page to manually edit the titles and descriptions one by one can be a task that takes several months. In today’s guide, I will be taking you through the process of optimising titles and descriptions in bulk for a WordPress site to improve efficiency and increase SEO performance.

Step 1: WP All Export

To be able to edit the titles and descriptions in bulk, you first need to pull them out of WordPress onto an Excel sheet, which means you can edit them all in one place. To do this, I used a plugin called WP All Export, which lets you export different types of data, including posts, pages, taxonomies and custom post types. Once you’ve decided what type of data you want to export (let’s say you’ve decided you want to edit the titles and descriptions on all your blog posts), then you can choose which data will be exported with your posts on your Excel sheet.

For example, if exporting blog posts, the data we would want (and need for our import to work later on) is the ID column, and any relevant custom fields you use on your site to add titles and descriptions to your web pages. Most people use either Yoast or Rank Math to input their metadata. For Yoast, you would want the_yoastwpseo_title (title) custom field and the yoastwpseo_metadesc (descriptions). The ID column is the most critical column you need when exporting data. This is the ID of each post you are exporting, and without it, WordPress won’t know which metadata belongs to which post when you re-import later on.

Step 2: Microsoft Excel and ChatGPT

The next step of the process, once you have exported the data, is to actually write your new titles and descriptions. You can obviously do this meticulously by hand, but as mentioned, with a large number of pages on your site, this may be exhaustive, even if you can now do it all on one sheet. Using ChatGPT to create new engaging titles and descriptions based on your existing ones is the quickest way to optimise performance while maintaining consistency and clarity. However, make sure when using ChatGPT, you follow some key rules, such as setting character limits. Titles that are too long are truncated and changed by Google. Also, descriptions should be short and snappy to attract users’ attention. For Titles, the character limit is typically between 50-60 characters, whereas for meta descriptions, it lies between 140 and 160 characters. You also run a risk of having your titles and descriptions rewritten by Google if they are too short. Typical minimum character limits include 30 for titles and 70-90 for meta descriptions. Also, try not to get it to create all your titles and descriptions in one go if you have a lot; trying to do too many at once can cause issues. I’ve found updating in batches of 50 is usually safe, but make sure you are double-checking for any errors. Here’s an example of a typical prompt I would use below:

Step 3: WP All Import

Once you have created your title and descriptions, The Import is the most crucial stage of the process because it has the most potential for things to go wrong. Understanding how to import with the correct settings is crucial in order to map your new titles and meta descriptions to the correct post.

1. Upload your CSV (Excel Sheet)
2. Choose a post type to modify – This will be posts for this, as we are updating blog titles and descriptions, but could also be pages or a custom post type.
3. Choose which Fields to Modify – This is one of the most important steps, as you need to tell the plugin when it runs your import, what fields you actually want it to update. For this import, it will be Yoast titles and descriptions as discussed previously.
4. Extra Settings – Make sure to click the box “Attempt to match to existing WordPress [posts before creating new posts” and then use Post ID as the identifier so it knows what post to attach your titles and descriptions to. If you don’t select this, it will create new WordPress posts and not try and update your existing content, leaving you with a slew of blank posts with descriptions and titles that you will then need to delete.
5. Make sure to tell WP Import to only update the custom fields you have specifically selected. You can see where to select this below.

Once you have updated all these settings correctly and are ready to run your import. It should only take a few minutes, and hundreds of your web pages will be updated with new and improved titles and descriptions.

Google has quietly rolled out two much-requested features within Google Business Profiles: the ability to schedule Google Posts and the ability to publish posts across multiple locations at once. For digital marketers and busy in-house teams, this update removes one of the most time-consuming parts of local optimisation.

What has changed

Google Posts can now be prepared in advance. When you create a post, you will see a new option titled “Schedule this post”. Once selected, you choose the date and time you want your update to go live.

According to Google’s Lisa Landsman, this means you can plan an entire week or month ahead and let posts publish automatically at the moment that suits your audience.

The second update supports multi-location publishing. If you manage more than one branch or storefront, you can create a single post and apply it to several locations in a single action. This is particularly useful for brands with regional or national footprints that want consistent messaging without repeating work.

Why it matters

Local marketers know how easy it is for Google Posts to slip down the priority list when days get busy. Scheduled posting gives teams the flexibility to create content during quieter moments and still have a steady stream of updates going out.

For agencies or brands handling multiple sites, the multi-location option reduces duplication and supports stronger consistency. One well-planned post can now be shared across all appropriate profiles with minimal effort.

What you should do next

There are two practical steps worth taking:

• Build Google Post planning into your workflow for campaign launches, events and seasonal promotions.
• Create a central content template that can be adapted and published across relevant locations.

With the holiday season approaching and customer search activity at its highest, these new features arrive at a good time. They offer a more organised and efficient way to keep your Google Business Profiles active, visible and aligned with your wider marketing calendar.

Getting your business ready for the new year and first quarter of 2026 is essential to putting your best foot forward. Being prepared means you and your business are ready to anticipate the natural ebbs and flows that are bound to happen throughout the business cycle.

Pre-planning provides a structure informed by the previous year’s successes and challenges. One that allows you to measure and grow, with goals defined, ready for you to make headway in that process.

Take a record of your current attainment

Assess your annual performance for the current year; this will allow you to set goals that are based on real data. This makes achieving your results tangible and also allows for natural growth rather than expecting radical change without delivering.

Taking note of the following metrics will put you in the best position to set the preceding year’s goals:

• Return on investment (ROI) – The overall profit you make allows you to assess whether you’re making revenue from your marketing efforts.

• Conversion rate – The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action compared with your total traffic.

• Bounce rate – The percentage of visitors who leave your site without engaging. A high bounce rate can indicate a poor user experience. Using heatmaps and session recordings helps you understand what’s not working.

• Cost per lead (CPL) – Calculated by dividing the overall cost of the campaign by the number of new leads.

• Customer acquisition cost – Is calculated by dividing the marketing and sales expenses by the number of new customers acquired.

• Click-through rate – Is the number of people clicking on such as an ad or a link. It is compared with the overall impression to give your insight into the effectiveness of your content, assets or copy.

• Engagement rate – The number of people interacting with a piece of content, i.e. liking, commenting, sharing.

Utilise key performance indicators to assess your current attainment, and then forecast realistic and relevant goals for your business.

Perform competitor audits

Taking stock of what other competitors in the market are doing, noting any changes in their strategy, allows you to anticipate and combat competition. Understanding where you perform against your competitors and analysing content gaps and opportunities keeps your business equipped to compete.

Looking at their content, site experience, social footprint, and overall SEO rankings will give you better insight into where to adjust your strategy. The aim isn’t to copy but to identify opportunities and gaps so you can outperform.

SEO, technical and content audits

Checking performance is crucial. It allows you to get an accurate starting point. If your site speed is low, conducting an audit will allow you to identify areas for improvement.

The same principle applies to SEO and content audits: identify what works and what doesn’t. The things that do work should be assessed, identifying what is making it successful, and then utilising that insight to set your business up for success. Equally, analysing poor-performing content, site features allows you to remove or adjust as needed so that it serves your customers.

Set goals by the quarter

Setting goals for each quarter accommodates natural growth and staying agile in a competitive market. Quarterly goals give you the flexibility to adapt and accommodate new campaigns as opportunities arise. Marketing continues to evolve, so working on a smaller scale allows for easier real-time adjustments that flex to the ever-changing needs of a business.

Taking a proactive approach to your year’s marketing strategy allows you to set expectations, iron out the logistics, and utilise a considered approach that is shaped around your business’s short-term and long-term goals.

Before January arrives, outline your campaigns and ensure your business has the capacity to deliver. This removes the guesswork and reduces unnecessary pressure

In one of the biggest shake-ups the SEO world has seen in years, Adobe has announced plans to acquire Semrush for 1.9 billion dollars. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.

For marketers, SEOs and digital teams, this is more than just another technology merger. It is a major moment that could reshape how brands approach visibility in search and, increasingly, in AI-driven recommendation systems.

Why this matters

Semrush has long been a major force in the SEO industry. Over the past decade it has grown from a keyword research tool into a full ecosystem for search visibility, content strategy, competitor intelligence and, more recently, GEO (generative engine optimisation), a new category focused on visibility in AI assistants and AI-powered search.

Adobe, meanwhile, sits at the centre of enterprise digital marketing. With tools such as Adobe Analytics, AEM and the newly launched Adobe Brand Concierge, it already influences how many of the world’s biggest companies manage customer experience.

By bringing Semrush into the Adobe universe, the lines between SEO, AI search, content creation and customer experience will become more closely connected.

A sign of where search is heading

The backdrop to this acquisition is clear: search is changing rapidly.

Consumers are no longer turning only to Google. They are increasingly asking AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini for recommendations, information and purchase decisions. Adobe’s own Analytics data shows that traffic from generative AI sources to United States retail sites increased by 1,200 percent year on year in October.

In this new landscape, traditional SEO alone is no longer enough. Brands need to understand how they appear not only in search results but also inside AI-generated answers. This is exactly where Adobe sees Semrush adding value.

What Adobe gains

Adobe is investing heavily in becoming the go-to platform for brand visibility in the AI era. Semrush brings more than ten years of SEO experience, along with rapidly developing GEO capabilities. This gives Adobe a direct route into SEO teams, an area of marketing where it has had limited presence until now.

For enterprise marketers already using Adobe tools, this could eventually create a seamless way to understand:

• how their brand appears on traditional search engines
• how it is surfaced in AI-generated answers
• how content performs across different channels
• where visibility gaps exist

In simple terms, Adobe wants to be the single source of truth for brand presence across the entire digital landscape.

How the SEO industry could change

This acquisition is likely to trigger wider shifts across SEO and martech.

1. SEO will become more closely aligned with AI – As GEO becomes a formal discipline, tools will need to measure and optimise brand presence inside AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results.

2. Enterprise SEO will become mainstream – Adobe’s influence will push SEO further into senior marketing conversations, presenting visibility as a key part of customer experience.

3. More consolidation is likely – Competitors may feel pressure to seek partnerships or acquisitions of their own in order to keep pace.

4. Content, search and analytics will move closer together – Traditional silos between SEO, content teams and customer experience platforms are likely to become less distinct.

The bottom line

This is not simply Adobe buying another tool. It is a clear sign that:

• SEO is evolving
• AI-driven search is becoming unavoidable
• Brand visibility will become the next major battleground for marketers

For SEOs and digital teams, the acquisition sets the stage for a future where search visibility, AI behaviour and customer experience are all connected within the same ecosystem. The speed of this shift will depend on how Adobe integrates Semrush although one thing is certain: the SEO industry has entered a new era.

Multi-Modal Content is the concept of creating one overarching piece of content that can be repackaged into multiple different forms to reach different audiences. This differs from a multi-channel approach to content marketing, which consists of just reusing the same piece of content in the same format across multiple platforms.

Examples of the Multi-Model Approach

At Intelligency, we believe in the value of using a multi-model approach towards client content as audiences differ from platform to platform based on demographic, attention span and different types of content they want to consume. A piece of video content for a client can be posted on the website, YouTube and in an email campaign. However, it can also be clipped up in the form of a YouTube short and Instagram Reel. This means we can target younger audiences with shorter attention spans on platforms more relevant to them.

Benefits of the Multi-Model Approach

Using a multi-model approach is more time-consuming, and some marketers may be wondering if it’s a sensible approach to spend extra time repurposing content for different platforms when they can reuse existing content. I will lay out some of the benefits of the multi-model approach and why I believe it is a worthwhile time investment.

• Less Content Creation – While it’s true that repurposing content does take more time than just simply reusing content, take into account the fact that the lifespan of the content after it’s been repurposed has been dramatically increased. This, therefore, means that you don’t have to spend as much time making different content from scratch and coming up with new ideas as often, which frees up more time to focus on other areas.
• Reaching Different Audiences – As mentioned previously, different platforms attract different audience demographics with different attention states. Posting the same content in its original form across multiple platforms might seem like a good idea; however, the audience on each platform (while there is obviously some overlap) is different and consumes content in different ways. Someone who typically watches podcasts on YouTube and someone who prefers short-form content, such as TikTok and would never listen to a podcast because they believe it’s “too long” have wildly different attention spans and approaches to what good content is. However, creating long-form content for a podcast-style video and then repurposing it into short, digestible TikTok clips allows us to catch both types of users as opposed to the one we were initially targeting.
• SEO Benefits – Google still dominates the search market (Even with the rise of ChatGPT and even though Google is still largely focused on written content, the different types of content that appear on the SERP now are more than ever before. From standard written content to AI Overviews, Videos and Images. Making sure your content comes in different forms, such as having video content and imagery to support your content in its written form, can help you target the SERP from different angles and give you an improved chance of appearing higher on the SERP and improve SEO results by extension.

How to start your Multi-Modal Approach

If you want to undertake a multi-model approach in the future when looking at your content strategy, one of the ways to do this is by auditing your existing content. Some of the content you already have posted on your site or different platforms may have potential to be repurposed into different formats that boost engagement. Go through your content systematically and look for any gems that could work in your favour. Once all existing content has been audited, you can make sure to focus on creating specific content that can be repurposed when coming

What is and when is black Friday?

Black Friday happens each year on the Friday following Thanksgiving. Aptly named by Philadelphia police in the sixties for the chaos that ensued as city dwellers and tourists took to the streets, causing carnage and chaos, they shopped to their hearts’ content.

This year it falls on the 28^th of November.

Black Friday has since evolved, with businesses and brands capitalising on the notoriety of the event. It’s become of commercial importance as a holiday; it signifies the start of Christmas shopping, which ultimately is the time when retailers see a significant increase in profit.

Should my business run a black Friday campaign?

Considering whether a business should run a black Friday campaign can be difficult, but there are several strategic, operational and financial factors to think through before creating a Black Friday campaign, which include:

• Product/ inventory reality: Can it be discounted? Do you have enough stock? Is your business logistically capable of selling something on a large scale if it’s needed?
• Your business model: If you sell B2C, then this is less of a concern, but if you’re a small business with a B2B model, then you may find that it’s less suited.
• Being technically prepared: Is your website built to accommodate high levels of traffic? Have you checked that the checkout process is smooth and efficient for the customer? Making sure the process is as easy as possible for the customer increases the chances of driving conversion.
• Competitive landscape: Are your competitors holding campaigns? Do you need to keep up with the competition and remain visible within your industry?
• Audience fit: Will your audience be motivated by a promotion? Have they previously responded to promotions?
• Luxury brands risk devaluing their positioning
• B2B companies often see less demand for tactical promotions
• High-trust or relationship-based services may not benefit from aggressive price cuts
• Customer experience: Customers on the receiving end of a poorly functioning site, bad deals, and confused messaging are likely to have a poor experience.
• Strategic alternatives: Some businesses benefit from taking a step back and capitalising on different holidays/occasions. Holiday campaigns face the risk of over-saturation to begin with, so taking a step back and focusing on Christmas or the January sales can be an effective way to

When should my Black Friday campaign start?

Picking the right time to launch your Black Friday campaigns is almost as essential as the messaging and assets. If timed correctly, a campaign can capture the curiosity and attention of existing and potential customers.

Begin the soft launch of your campaigns in late September or early October. This can be done simply, with an email hinting at what’s to come. Create intrigue for existing customers with things like early access to products or exclusive early-bird discounts. 

Mid-October is when we recommend ramping up the messaging on exclusivity and deals. It’s the perfect time to capture your warm audience and create some buzz around the event.

As November rolls around, this is the point of intensity where leads are being nurtured with follow-up emails. It’s a great time to commence a countdown for your sales, again reiterating the limited time left until Black Friday and the exclusive shot-time deals available to customers.  

Even after the Black Friday sales are over, give those who have abandoned cart a last chance to snag a deal on the product they want.

The campaign period usually spans around two months, but for some companies it may be as little as a week.

How to design an effective Black Friday marketing campaign?

Emotion, entertainment and relatability are all feelings that drive conversion, whether that’s engagement through a click or a lead that becomes a conversion.  Creating a campaign that resonates with the audience is a tactful way to put your brand in the minds of viewers.

A great campaign provokes thought at minimum, and a reaction (i.e. a sale) at most. Think about how you can connect with your audience, whether that’s creating a sense of urgency through ‘last chance’ messaging or using UGC in your campaign to create a sense of relatability from a customer perspective.

Should I create landing pages especially for Black Friday?

If you’ve made the decision to run a campaign, then we absolutely recommend creating a tailored landing page. This allows you to home in on the types of content and visual assets that are more likely to drive conversion.

Striking a balance between urgency and building trust is key for these pages. You want the customer to feel like they can build trust and rely on your company’s honesty.

Using urgency design like countdown banners, is a great way to remind the customer of the time limitations, encouraging them to buy the product before their time runs out. Providing a deadline makes it super clear how long your deal will last, giving the customer an explicit reason to purchase the product. 

Make sure the content is benefit-led. Keeping your offering clear and driven is essential; the customer doesn’t necessarily care about the minor details of the product as much as the details of how it’s going to benefit them.

Addressing the customer’s problem without them having to infer how your product/ service helps them slashes the decision-making time for the customer.

How should I measure performance for Black Friday?

There are a number of metrics and measurement techniques that allow you to assess the success of your Black Friday:

• Total revenue generated – This is ideal, especially if you have the metrics from the previous year. It will allow you to measure growth YoY, as well as being able to better forecast the following years.
• Conversion rate – Your conversion rate will either validate the UX of your landing pages, or it will signal an issue. This, coupled with heatmaps, can be an incredible piece of insight for people to see.
• Average order value – Knowing the average order value will allow you to see whether Black Friday sales measure up to the day-to-day performance of the business.
• Return on ad spend and cost per acquisition– Understand the profitability of your campaigns with ROAS. It is a direct way to see how effective your campaign is at generating leads. Cost per acquisition allows you to understand the cost to acquire your leads, which is especially useful for future budget allocation.
• Return rates – A spike in returns can sharply reduce margins — especially in apparel, electronics or beauty.
• Track return rate vs. typical periods.
• Website traffic and session quality – Track:
• Users
• Sessions
• Bounce rate
• Time on site
• Pages per session

These numbers reveal whether the campaign attracted the right traffic and whether your messaging matched expectations.

Final Thoughts

Black Friday continues to be one of the biggest commercial moments of the year, but success isn’t about simply slashing prices or joining the noise. The businesses that truly win are the ones that prepare early, understand their audience, and execute campaigns with intention and clarity. Whether you choose to participate fully, take a lighter-touch approach, or sit it out in favour of more strategic seasonal opportunities, the goal remains the same: deliver value in a way that strengthens your brand, not dilutes it.

With thoughtful planning, strong creativity, and the right performance metrics in place, Black Friday can be more than a promotional event; it can be a catalyst for long-term customer relationships and meaningful revenue growth. So take the time to evaluate your fit, refine your messaging, and build an experience your customers will remember for the right reasons.