The holiday season has officially set in! While stores decked with festive decorations and kids screaming trick-or-treat are a common sight across the streets, digital inboxes will be flooded with ads featuring holiday-special offers tempting shoppers to rush into stores.
The holiday purchases reach a fever pitch, particularly around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a time where impulse-driven purchases are at peak and so are endless opportunities for marketers to lure more traffic and ring up hefty holiday sales. Since Christmas music starts to blast through the radio as early as October, paid advertisers need to start thinking about treating their search and display campaigns to some extra TLC in advance so as to take advantage of the holiday rush.
That said, we have put together some effective practices to optimise your PPC campaigns to accommodate holiday shoppers and make sure that your ads are drawing attention and being clicked.
Tip #1. Plan Ahead
When it comes to internet marketing, the importance of advance planning cannot be stressed enough. Google reports that shoppers start looking for Christmas presents two weeks ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This gives marketers a great opportunity to tap into their customers’ and prospects’ holiday shopping patterns and prepare their Christmas campaigns to bring in huge revenue.
A good holiday PPC advertising plan should include:
Budgeting
Shoppers’ holiday preparation starts in early October. Setting the right budget and goals beforehand will allow you to wisely spend your money on shoppers who are actually looking for your products. It is recommended that you look into the last year’s holiday sales data, especially that from October to December, to calculate a budget for this year’s campaign. With valuable sales data in hand, you can also capture missed traffic by bidding more on days where your past click rate decreased but your competitors’ click share increased. Just be sure to allow some degree of flexibility in your budget so as to survive holiday shopping peaks and declines.
Setting a Promotional Calendar
According to a study done by the National Retail Federation, one-third of shoppers claimed that all of their weekend purchases over the holidays were especially driven by promotions. That said, it is important that your promotions are scheduled and aligned beforehand to deliver a great holiday shopping experience to your customers.
Sit with your merchandising team and determine what and how long you want to run your promotions. Identify which promotions brought you the highest conversions and revenue during last year’s holiday season and optimise this year’s campaigns accordingly. Do not forget to ask about new products, doorbuster deals, site-wide promotions and exclusive promo codes.
Building a crisis management plan
Where there are holidays, there could be crisis. Define what exactly is a crisis for your business and determine who all need to be involved in your holiday crisis management team. When preparing for potential risks and troubles, it would be helpful to keep holiday on-call contacts handy and decide on the expected lead time.
Tip #2. Target Holiday-Specific Keyword
Are you sure you know your target audience? Because the shopper groups you have been targeting throughout the year might not be the same as the ones you wish to reach during major holidays. During holiday, people prefer to buy gifts for others rather than themselves. Like women might be looking for perfumes to gift their male partners. Men, on the other hand, might be searching for women’s dresses.
So, perform comprehensive keyword research and analysis to find out more generic yet relevant phrases for your ads. Use the ones that may not have worked for you during the year but are likely to result in significant search volume with the onset of specific holiday.
Create separate campaigns for these holiday-specific keywords and track them through campaigns regularly to optimise their performance.
Tip #3. Optimise your Google ads for Holiday Season
It is natural for store sales to fluctuate throughout the year even with highly optimised Google ads in place. It is not always the ineffectiveness of your campaigns that results in low conversions or sales but the varying season. People tend to shop more during some seasons than others. For that, you need to…
Get your Timeline in Order
Determine what is the best time to launch campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas. Pushing the ad campaign too early can negatively impact your sales and if you publish it too late, it is likely that people have already capitalised on best deals from other merchants.
So, it is important to understand when exactly the ad should be shown to the customers for maximum impressions and conversions. Like, for Black Friday Sales, usually putting up your ad three days before the big event will give shoppers enough time to access your deals. Also, the ideal time for selling Christmas sweaters is on December 14. So, you must understand such shopping patterns to schedule your ads wisely.
However, when it comes to other holiday sales like Christmas, ads need to be launched weeks in advance and merchants should regularly tweak creative elements and optimise ads.
Speaking of which…
Consider Adjusting your Ad Title and Copy
In shopping ad campaigns, titles act as keywords and can greatly impact shoppers’ buying decision, in a good way! Be sure to optimise your store’s top-performing product’s ad titles to achieve higher impressions.
Create several ads for each ad group, so that Google has a selection of your ads to publish. Look through query reports to determine top-converting keywords and include them in your ad titles. Using terms like “limited period offer”, “discounts”, and “save” in your titles can help attract more traffic.
In addition to optimising your advert titles for high-performing keywords, consider adding event qualifiers to product terms, such as “Black Friday deals on iPhone” or “Christmas discounts on Jackets”.
Employ Ad extensions
Another great element of PPC adverting that provides the opportunity to set your ads apart from your competitors is an ad extension. You can use callout extension to highlight your USP (Unique Selling Point) and entice shoppers to click on your ad. For instance, mentioning “Free Delivery” which many of your competitors may not be offering, can help you stand out with a better chance of a user clicking on your ad and taking the required action. Some of the recommended types of ad extensions that can make a difference in your PPC conversions include promotions and structured snippet.
The Final Word
The holiday season offers marketers tremendous opportunities to increase conversion and sales. However, to maximise the potential of holiday sales, you have to be innovative and strategic with your promotions, PPC campaigns, landing pages, advertising optimisation efforts and everything in between.
With a mix of early preparation, research, learning and constant optimisation, you will be able to optimise your PPC campaigns for biggest profits. While there are chances of higher purchases and sales during this period, even the smallest of advertising mistake can take a toll on the success of your campaign. Therefore, it may be wise to seek the assistance of a firm that specialises in AdWords management.
Besides, you can even run your ad campaigns on Bing as a major portion of audiences still uses Bing. The best part is many firms that run Google ads offer services for Bing ads marketing in Sydney as well with a guarantee of profitable results.
Keep these points in mind and make the best use of your ad platform.
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