Prepare Your PPC Campaigns for the Holiday Season

As the holiday season quickly approaches, so does the need for paid search managers to prepare their campaigns for a successful Q4. Shoppers start researching products earlier each year and if you haven’t started holiday planning yet, now is the time to start.

For marketers who have run PPC in the past, the first step in your holiday planning process should be analyzing your previous performance and strategy. Use last year’s ROI or CPA as benchmarks for this holiday season. Determining which days & weeks were most profitable, which keywords & ads had the highest CTR & conversion rates, and which products were best sellers will help you strategize & set budgets. Also, be sure to evaluate what didn’t work. If you missed your performance goals, ran out of budget on your busiest days, or had less than compelling ad copy, make sure to address these issues with this year’s strategy.

Next, decide whether you want to create holiday specific campaigns or incorporate holiday keywords and ad copy with your existing campaigns. However you choose to structure your campaigns, make sure to consider the following:

Key Days: When did search traffic begin increasing last year? Were there any days traffic spiked in addition to Black Friday & Cyber Monday? In 2017, 32% of online holiday revenue was generated between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. Make sure your campaigns have the budget to accommodate this traffic and remember to budget for a small lift in traffic in the weeks following Christmas.

Keywords:Make sure to incorporate keywords that had the highest CTRs and conversions into your shopping feed, as well as bid on holiday, gift, and recipient specific terms like “Black Friday deals” and “gifts for dad.”

Ad Copy: As with keywords, incorporate text like “Cyber Monday Sale” and utilize countdown ads to create a sense of urgency around promotions, the last day to order for delivery, or how few days are left to shop before the holiday (“Only 5 Days Until Christmas”). You can also use IF functions to message discounts to your remarketing pool only and convert early season window shoppers or email subscribers to purchasers.

Ad Extensions: Any promotions lasting less than one or two weeks should be highlighted in a promotion extension rather than ad copy, unless you are using ad customizers to update them. Include sitelinks to pages showcasing your best sellers, gift sets, etc. Use callouts for shipping info (“Free Shipping,” “2 Day Shipping,” etc.). According to the National Retail Federation, 89% of holiday shoppers intended to make in store purchases in 2018.If you have physical retail locations, use location extensions to promote in-store visits or in-store pickups, especially in the week leading up to December 25 when express shipping becomes prohibitively expensive for most shoppers.

Mobile Shopping: According to Google, over 50% of mobile users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. When you consider about 40% online retail sales take place on mobile devices and that number increases to 50% during Cyber Week, mobile load time can make or break the customer experience.  If your mobile site is currently slow to load, difficult to navigate, or difficult to checkout on, fix these issues now so you don’t miss out on a valuable revenue stream.

Automated Bidding: Leveraging automated bidding can help your campaigns bring in more revenue or reach a higher ROAS by automatically adjusting your bids based on the likelihood a search will convert. If you are planning to utilize smart bidding on your search and shopping campaigns,  test them now. It takes about two weeks for automated bid strategies to ramp, and another two to evaluate performance. With tROAS and maximize conversion value bid strategies both available this season, it’s worth testing automated bidding to see how they improve campaign performance while streamlining campaign management.

Advertisers already using tROAs bidding may want to adjust their targets to allow their campaigns to bid more aggressively.This helps accommodate spikes in traffic and conversion rate to capture additional revenue during major sales periods, like the week after Thanksgiving. You can even automate this process by adding a seasonality adjustment to your search or display campaigns that use automated bidding under the Advanced Controls section on the Bid Strategies page. Seasonality adjustments let your bid strategies know to expect a change in conversion rate during the sales period and bid accordingly, then immediately revert back to pre-sales behavior.