Christmas is just a few days away. Hard to believe, right? As much as we adore the idea of the holidays, we surely do forget how fast this time of the year comes. One moment we are celebrating the 4th of July, and the next thing we know, we are cooking Turkey. So it is that time of the year, and everyone is officially in their holiday spirit. Yes, even the marketers and businesses! Since all these events take place so fast, it becomes crucial to create a Holiday PPC strategy and begin the planning of search campaigns.
Did you know that the holiday season gives ample opportunities to businesses, irrespective of the industry? According to a stat by Oberlo, in 2021, the largest annual growth of holiday retail sales happened as the sales hit $889.30 billion, beating the previous high recorded in 2020.
Guess the Christmas season does well for everyone. How do you ask? Well, for starters it is the season of gifts and people become quite generous in opening their wallets and spending their credit card money. So why not cash in the momentum of the gift season?
PPC platforms are an ideal way of getting an edge at any given time of the year, thus allowing businesses to show ads to people searching for products and creating demand with platforms like Google, Instagram, and Facebook. Having said all of that, only a few businesses understand how to leverage seasonal advertising techniques to optimize the best outcomes. But why one might askwhat is the need for the holiday PPC campaign strategy to be any different from the regular one? Let us first answer that for you:
Why do my Holiday PPC Strategies need to be Different?
It might look like the pay-per-click platforms are getting stability. However, when it comes to the holidays, the PPC strategy that adapts well to this season is most likely to win over our dear Internet users. As a marketer, there are a few considerations you must make while strategizing a plan:
- Consumers Avoid Impulse Buying
While the number of impulse buying increases, many of them are not truly impulsive decisions anymore. Today, if not comprehensive research, customers will at least do a quick search for who is offering the best deal before buying.
- Specialized Search
Customers might do specialized searches, like ‘Black Friday sales’ or ‘4th of July sales’. They happen to be the users whose searches are high-intent. However, you must curate your service or product in such a way that they will immediately respond to it. This holds true for both display ads and search ads.
- Increasing Pricing
As businesses are booming with each passing day, it means the pricing can and often does skyrocket. Therefore, your costs can (and often do) increase, so your PPC strategy must be on point to stay competitive.
If you want to be successful with your upcoming holiday PPC campaign, you don’t have to necessarily incorporate some significant change in your overall marketing plan or audience, but there are a few key changes that you should consider. The points mentioned above are proof of it.
This holiday season, search engine marketers investing in the appropriate strategies can be prepared to dominate the PPC landscape. Read on to know what you should do.
What are the Best Strategies for Holiday PPC Campaigns?
During the holiday season, paid search advertising offers a big opportunity for businesses to gain exposure and drive revenue. However, everyone has become smart, so the competition is higher now than ever before. Moreover, Google has made some important changes to its Search algorithm that will hugely impact how the ads will be shown when someone is looking for something with your target keywords, most notably with query level targeting and impression share bidding. In order to stay ahead of the competition, marketers must implement multiple changes in their marketing strategy. While these techniques are yet to be mainstream in Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, a few marketers know how to leverage seasonal advertising tactics.
The cat is out of the bag. Trust your growth marketing agency when they say that people behave differently in the frantic holiday season, and it keeps growing with each passing year. Obviously, you have to configure the ads in such a way that it offers an optimized result and allows a good market penetration. These are some of the ways you can strategize your plan:
A Goal Without a Plan is Only a Wish
If you are planning a holiday PPC campaign, now is the time to do it. So what are you going to run for the upcoming holiday season? Oftentimes, people start their holiday shopping in the month of October too. In such cases, your PPC ad must focus on educating people about your service or products in the month of September.
Holiday PPC optimization is the key. An example would probably help. You must have a landing page with all the content the users are looking for, along with all the necessary product or service information that takes no loading time. Also, make sure all the special offers and discounts are correctly loaded. Doing this helps in setting the stage for campaign success and offers data that you can use strategically while going forward. Acting early also ensures the ad approval is done on time and ready for posting.
Another important thing to consider is that the advertising space becomes quietly cluttered during holidays which is why you must make the most of your campaigns and ads. You can review your last year’s search impression shares by asking questions like:
- Did our competitors outbid us last year?
- Did we have any ads with a good Return on Ad Spend but a low search impression share?
If your answer is yes to questions like these, you have lost a significant amount of possible ROI. Therefore, don’t let your budgets and bids inhibit you. Instead, plan ahead of time and see results.
It is the Season for Festive Keywords
When you are planning a holiday PPC strategy, choose the right keywords to ensure its success. Primarily, choose the keywords that you think are relevant to your services or products. Also, pay attention to choosing festive keywords for the holidays that suit your offerings in the best way possible. Finally, note that you have allocated a sufficient budget for the keywords during the holidays. Many PPC campaigns will focus on keywords that include words like ‘Christmas,’ ‘gifts,’ or terms like ‘Christmas gifts for friends’. So if you want to bid high so that people notice you, do not have any budget constraints.
Apart from budget, what you need to do is look at your previous campaigns to get an idea of which keywords witnessed the best conversions and get rid of those that failed to perform. You can also try variations of keywords that have a lower Cost per Click (CPC). This particular strategy is only limited to search ad platforms like Bing Ads and Google Ads and search placements in both YouTube Ads and Promoted Pins. This is an important strategy if you use any of these platforms.
Oftentimes, advertisers don’t pay attention to creating campaigns targeting holiday-specific keywords each year. Let us tell you that this is a significant opportunity that many miss and thus fail to reach a highly targeted audience. For example, a user is looking for “Christmas hats for toddlers” is undoubtedly looking for Christmas gifts, and there is a good chance that they will purchase the sponsored product suggestions:
Making Ad Copy Merry and Bright
While writing an ad copy, one has to be creative and witty as the holiday season gives more leeway to make the copy even more creative and happening. You can always use puns and metaphors. It not just keeps the copy light but also makes an emotional connection with the audience. When you use offer and discount language, it will make your ad become distinct and prompt more sales.
Some examples of words or phrases you can use are our coupon, sale, bargain, free shipping, % off, and limited time. Also, go for CTAs that create urgency among potential buyers. For example, some phrases you can use are ‘discount ends soon,’ ‘promo valid until.’ This will prompt the viewer to go to the landing page and make a purchase right away.
You must adapt the content in your ad campaigns. This will help you appeal to holiday shoppers. During the holiday season, the ads containing holiday messaging will be the ones that attract the attention of the users quickly. It allows the users to think about holiday gifts, thus emotionally appealing to them and recommending something that they might be looking for.
A good example would be the image below. Here, the marketer did not change the ad campaign. All they did was switch text about the sale and convey to people that it could be the ideal custom holiday gift. Though it is subtle, it conveys a lot.
This strategy is ideal for both display ads and scratch ads, persuading people. After all, people often fail to think of something as a present for someone or themselves until someone suggests it to them.
Put a Bow on it with Ad Extensions and Remarketing
Talking about PPC campaign ideas for holidays and not mentioning ad extensions and remarketing would be a sin. Okay, not a sin, but definitely incomplete. The extra copy lines that are displayed under the main copy heading are ad extensions. They give the ad more traction and boost the ad’s rank on the search engine’s result page.
When you use ad extensions, the shoppers get an understanding of your business that entices them to click on the link. Price extensions, promotion extensions, site link extensions, and structured snippet extensions are some of the types of ad extensions that come free with the Google Ad package. They improve click rates and level up your position on a search page.
- Price Extensions– it shows the current price of certain services or products.
- Site link extensions– allows marketers to add links to key pages or products.
- Promotion extensions – allows advertising any special holiday offers the marketer is running.
- Structured snippet extensions– allows showcasing extra details that might pique the interest of the user, like variations of a product, amenities, or features.
Remarketing Google Ads remarketing can be quite useful if you want to attract traffic to your website as it boosts user traffic and gives your business a chance to build a relationship with new customers during the holiday season. If you believe in having Christmas traditions, make the application of remarketing Google ads for all PPC campaigns as one and it will surely reap you benefits.
Don’t Re-gift, but Definitely Remarket
Always leverage remarketing whenever and wherever it is possible for your business. It forms one of the best conversion techniques of today. Today’s popular search engines like Bing and Google let brands target standard or display text ads to their valuable visitors to their websites. When you do this, you make sure that your potential customers interact with the ad that is all about the service or product they had shown interest in previously.
This form of digital advertising is personalized to each user and therefore is more targeted than a display ad that usually targets certain search terms. Also, remarketing ads usually cost less than ads that appeal to a more generic audience. Given that the target audience are those who had previously shown interest in your website, this method is more likely to prompt a purchase in the future.
Today, most users, if not on search engines, are online on other platforms. In such cases, you can leverage the powerful display ad network of Bing and Google to show you ads across the web. This way, you can target the customers who might be your best prospects. This way, you can capitalize on users who checked out your offering but didn’t make a purchase yet.
Dash Through the Barriers for Prompting Purchase
People do holiday shopping as they are busy with work the rest of the year. Moreover, it is convenient as they get multiple options’ all at discounted prices. So if you want them to pick your service or product, you must put all your efforts into eliminating any barriers when they decide to purchase it.
One of the best places to begin is offering free shipping. 9 out of 10 consumers say free shipping is one of the biggest takeaways when it comes to online shopping. In-store pickup, especially during the holiday season, is another crucial factor as people hope to pick a product in-store. You can highlight both the benefits on your product pages and your shopping ads with merchant promotions.
Clean Up Your Product Feed
Though you must always work on optimizing your feed all year round, starting it right before the holiday season starts is an ideal time. It ensures you give your conversion percentages a raise. You can optimize the following:
- Product titles
- Images
- Descriptions
- Product types
- Product categories
Irrespective of whether you have optimized them before, there is always a scope for improvement that might directly contribute to click-through rates. You can witness a huge impact on performance even if you do something as simple as changing the primary product page. For making multiple feed variations, you can use supplemental feeds for testing changes.
Apart from this, you must also go through and ensure all your fields are filled, as missing information might result in Google disapproving your products. You must also make sure that you are not sending paid traffic to any ‘out-of-stock’ product landing pages. This is something you wouldn’t want in the middle of peak holiday shopping.
There you have it! We have mentioned all the best PPC strategies you can devise to make the most of the occasion. But, ready or not, the holidays are coming, and you must make sure your services and products stay on the top of your mind when people shop.
Wrapping Up!
There is so much you can gain during the holiday season, and with a well-planned PPC campaign, you will only see wins. Internet shopping will only increase this season as they have facilitated same-day delivery and in-store pickup. Optimizing your holiday PPC strategies is the key to succeeding in eCommerce. So businesses need to suit up this holiday season with a proper growth marketing strategy and get the highest conversion numbers.
So assess, optimize, and start planning PPC campaigns for your current products and services. Prioritizing these crucial months in your PPC campaign will keep you ahead of the competition and escalate the benefits of holiday shopping to generate more sales year after year. So you are sure to have a happy and prosperous holiday season. Tis the season, after all!
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