Paid search advertising can help increase customer purchases during the holiday season; however, it can be difficult to know where to spend your money to beat out competitors.
You’re giving yourself plenty of time to figure out your strategy by planning it now.
In order to assist you in beginning, we are providing 10 of our effective pay-per-click tactics, which we have obtained through years of experience working with renowned eCommerce businesses all around the world.
As you prep for this year’s holiday season, use this list to maximize your eCommerce PPC efforts and revenue:
HOW TO CREATE MORE EFFECTIVE HOLIDAY PPC ADS
It is common knowledge that potential customers act differently during the hectic shopping season, which appears to be getting longer each year. To make your paid search ads campaigns successful, you need to optimize them differently.
Here are the strategies we recommend for our eCommerce clients during the busiest time of the year:
1. Review historical campaign budget.
It’s been a wild ride for eCommerce PPC strategists over the past few years. You can bet that 2022 will be just as unanticipated as years past, given the circumstances of COVID-19, the boom of online shopping, and the signs of an upcoming recession.
Even though you shouldn’t solely rely on historic performance to predict future outcomes, it’s still a good idea to look at it, especially when considering your ad spend.
To get a more accurate understanding of what your optimal budget should be, we recommend looking at your holiday spend from 2018 to 2020. look at how much your campaigns cost and how effective they were- keep in mind that ecommerce, especially mobile ecommerce, will make up a bigger part of holiday shopping.
In addition to researching your competitors, be sure to look at historical data for your Google Ads competitors and your specific industry.
If there is evidence to support it, plan on increasing the budget for your holiday paid search campaigns.
2. Plan for an increased budget.
Since advertising space becomes more limited during the holidays, you need to make sure you’re getting the most exposure for your ads by having the proper budget and bidding approach.
First, look at the search impression shares from last year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Then, look at the search impression shares for the rest of the holiday season. Did your competitors outbid you last year? Do you have any high ROAS campaigns that have low search impression share?
If you find yourself wondering whether or not you left money on the table, it’s likely that you did.
To stay ahead of the competition this year, proactively ensure that your campaign’s bids and budgets will not result in losing high-value traffic, even if it requires a larger investment from your digital marketing team.
If you don’t have time to manage your budget fluctuations yourself, there are services that can do it for you. In Google Ads, you can create automated rules to increase or limit your budget during the holiday season.
3. Break top performers into their own campaigns.
Holidays mean increased traffic to your ad campaigns. This means that your campaigns will not have the desired effect and you will not be able to reach your target audience.
When traffic is heavy, you want your top performers to have the resources they need to succeed. If you want to avoid missing out, you should consider key purchases and site visits.
Split your campaigns into smaller ad groups to make the most of them this holiday season. If you want more control over your budget, separate your top performers into unique campaigns. This will make it easier to adjust your spending to get the best return possible.
4. Get aggressive with your bids.
The amount of traffic on the roads will increase during the holidays. This is a call to action to increase the intensity of your bids.
Cost-per-clicks will rise over the next few months for popular products and keywords, and your bidding strategies will need to adjust to keep up:
- If you’re using an automated strategy, amp up the aggressiveness of your bidding to maintain your positions in ad results.
- Don’t forget that this will be the first holiday shopping season with Google’s new Performance Max campaigns, which means you’ll need to be extra careful about reviewing your settings, automation goals, exclusions (if possible), product filtering, and audience signals — which are all brand-new for advertisers this year.
- If you’re manually bidding, keep a close eye on your search impression share throughout the season. When you see drops in your rankings, make appropriate bid optimizations to boost them again.
5. Plan your promotional calendar.
Don’t have a promotional ad calendar yet? Make that your first priority.
Choose the products you want to advertise based on past performance and the holiday calendar.
Once you’ve spoken with your promotional team and have your calendar in hand, you can begin preparing your holiday PPC campaigns. Create your promotions in Google Merchant Center, and make sure your promotion extensions are also active.
6. Schedule holiday-specific PPC ads.
Although product ads are common, you can’t depend on them to help with your holiday season plans. You will achieve the best results if you spend time and energy creating advertising that is specific to the holiday.
Shoppers during the holidays are looking for things like good deals, something unique, and things that are easy to purchase. You can use phrases like these in your ad copy, as well as power words and holiday phrases, to appeal to what shoppers are looking for. Some examples:
- “Buy Today for Pre-Christmas Arrival”
- “Holiday Sale: Up to 50% Off”
If you are selling products that could be used for holiday gatherings, you should put that information in yourcopy as well (for example, “Holiday Party Napkins”).
Be sure to create ads for any new holiday products you are launching as well.
A useful tip is to coordinate with your SEO and social media teams to ensure that your messaging is consistent during this important time.
7. Find opportunities in specific holiday keywords.
To create holiday-specific ads, look up potential search queries to target using keyword research.
This isn’t just about finding keywords like “gifts”; you can get as specific as you want, based on things like search volume, CPC, and your brand’s past performance.
Say you sell dog toys. You could (and probably should) run ads for keywords like “gifts for dogs,” but you’ll likely also find success with keywords like:
- “Christmas dog toys”
- “Dog toys Christmas sale”
- “Holiday dog toys”
One of the best aspects of targeting these keywords during the holidays is that many eCommerce businesses forget to do so, which could lead to less competition for your brand and a higher return.
If you are bidding on new keywords for the holiday season, be careful about CPCs and plan to monitor your efficiency more than usual. You want to be prepared when entering this market, so you know what to expect in terms of the keywords and their performance.
8. Optimize your product feed.
Your Google Shopping feed should always be optimized. If you want your feed to be seen by holiday shoppers, make sure to update it well in advance.
Every listing should include the bare minimum to help shoppers find your products:
- A Global Tracking Identification Number (GTIN)
- The right keywords
- A specific product category
- An optimized product description
- Descriptive product titles (with the most important keywords at the front)
- Attractive, original product images
We also recommend that you check your shipping prices. holiday deals. Make sure the information for your products in Merchant Center is accurate and up-to-date, including any Ensure that the data for your products in Merchant Center is accurate, current, and includes any holiday promotions. You don’t want to have any shipping inaccuracies that will result in a Google penalty.
Check your product landing pages for accuracy to avoid any problems with Google.
9. Increase your budget significantly.
During high seasons, you should increase your budget. Significantly.
If you don’t take these huge fluctuations into account during the busy season, you will miss out on a lot of money. This means that if there is a four times increase in searches, the budget might not be enough.
This example shows that we should also take into account holidays that are not considered “regular”. An increase in interest can be seen as a season and should be treated as such.
10. Increase your bids significantly (Including Bid Adjustments)
During high seasons you will convert better. This statement means that while there may be a notable difference in quality between two things, one will always be better than the other.
Your competitors will also start improving their conversion rates. And when an advertiser starts converting better two things will happen:
- They will actively start bidding higher to take over a greater portion market share.
- Their system will bid higher automatically as it sees the ROAS going up.
You should do the same. You should expect to bid 2-3 times more, and sometimes even more, for product-specific queries. Your advertising budget should align with your ROAS, but you should be prepared to increase your bids.
11. Consider splitting your ‘Money-Maker’ campaigns into mobile
This is both a general tip and also applies during your high season. I tend to split my highest-revenue driving campaigns into their own mobile campaigns so that I can be more nuanced with how I work with them. Breaking up a campaign makes it easier for me to concentrate and plan for success.
I don’t prioritize mobile devices when I group campaigns together, although I’m not sure if that’s just a personal preference or habit. Many AdWords professionals are baffled by the lack of attention mobile gets inside AdWords accounts. As Matt Umbro mentions in his article, this is something that continues to perplex many of us.
The majority of traffic today will come from mobile devices. Think about that.
12. Boost your dynamic display remarketing
By this time, you’ve increased your budget. You’ve increased your bids. You will experience a massive increase in visitors to your website during this time:
This means that there will be more visitors for you to remarket to. You’ll want to make sure your budget and bids are high enough for your dynamic remarketing campaign.
During this time of increased visitation, it is a good idea to create additional segments/audience lists.
13. Activate or boost your Dynamic Search Ads.
This means that out of every 100 searches, 15 are ones that have never been done before.
Dynamic Search Ads are the best way to find new customers who are interested in your product, but may not be familiar with your brand. Your high season is when products and categories that are not normally worth adding to your AdWords campaigns increase in sales.
Although not all products will sell more, it is still not worth your time to create campaigns for all these products. Dynamic Search Ads give you exposure to keywords that you haven’t considered recently.
14. Increase optimization frequency.
The more you invest in your PPC campaigns during high-traffic periods, the more successful they will be.
I understand that running an e-commerce store requires extra attention during high seasons, not just PPC. You should perform AdWords optimizations at least twice as often. You should start making daily changes to your store if it is big enough, and you have enough data to support these changes.
15. Have a plan for when your season ends.
I had the most amazing experience with the Christmas season when I was younger. We had great success and record-high ROI.
I hadn’t realized that I would need to continue working after the season ended. I assumed that simply reverting my ads back to their original state would suffice.
Big mistake.
I had set my bids much higher than before, so when the conversion rates dropped in early January, we saw a sharp decrease in our ROI. I didn’t realize that we would have to undo all the changes we made for Christmas until a week later.
I’ll never make that mistake again.
I recommend that you label all new additions during the peak season. Try changing your bid to manual for a week or two, and then step it all down. You may also need to undo any new bid adjustments you have made.
If You Don’t Have Time, Do These Two Things
I like to share just one tip at the end of each of my posts. Today, that was particularly hard. I created a list of 13 must-do items, which defeats the point of recommending just one thing.
With that in mind, I recommend that you focus on taking advantage of the increase in searches by performing the following changes:
- Increase your budget by 50 percent.
- Increase all bids by 20 percent.
If everything stays the same, taking this action will lead to more profit during the upcoming peak time. You can get more out of your holiday PPC campaigns if you follow the advice in this post.
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