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Holiday Shopping doesn’t only refer to the individual promotion days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. By the Black Friday and Cyber Monday period, shoppers have already completed 42% of their holiday shopping. Therefore, setting up an effective strategy in advance is crucial to capitalize on this season.
Don’t miss out and set up your Holiday Strategy now.
6 Tips To Set Up an Effective Holiday Strategy
1. Forecast Your Budget
Since the search volume for your products will spike throughout the holiday season, it is essential to set the right budget and to be able to get most out of these holiday shoppers.
A good way to do so is by pulling historical data for the holidays and add your account’s year-over-year trend. Take into account the lost impression share due to budget as an indicator of how much more you should allocate this year.
2. Take Advantage of Promotion Extensions
Ad Extensions are an easy, non-time-consuming way to boost your performance and create more appealing ads for the holiday season. You want to think about specific promotions and discounts that can make you stand out from your competition and attract more customers to your store.
Create promotion extensions to show special sales and offers with your ads, which will help potential customers to spot your deals and serve to generate new sales for your business.
3. Expand Your Ad Schedule To Adjust for Irregular Shopping Trends
Google Ads ad scheduling is a great way to increase your ROI and ensure you are not draining your budget on hours and days that are not profitable for you.
However, with the holidays around the corner, it is required to expand your ad schedule, in order to survive the holiday shopping peaks. You can pull historical data to review the lost impression share on specific days and hours of the days to help you determine how to expand your ad schedule to get ready for the 2018 holidays.
4. Capitalize on Increasing Mobile Traffic
Taking into account that 76% of U.S. holiday shoppers over 18 use three or more channels, it is imperative to start capitalizing on mobile traffic if you are not doing so already.
Use specific ad copy for mobile users through Google Ads’ IF Functions and set bid adjustments for mobile devices to capture those pre-holiday shoppers on mobile. Make sure to enable cross-device tracking to evaluate the performance.
5. Increase Exposure with New Holiday Specific Keywords
Not only have searches for “shopping near me” grown over 200% in the past two years, but also other specific searches such as “free shipping”, “discount”, “same day shipping”, “gift”, “promotion” tend to spike during the season. Review your keyword list and search terms to add variations that could be valuable for your business.
6. Leverage Automatic Bidding Strategies to Remain Competitive
The holiday season is extremely competitive when it comes to Google Ads. Search volume and traffic is much higher, which means that you will to update your bidding more frequently as well. You are already very busy running your business and making sure that you are getting the most out of this season and most likely won’t have time to remain on top of your bids. The solution? Trust the machine! Google Ads has a lot of options available when it comes to automated bid management. It will update your product bids in real-time for every auction at the product level and incorporate the user’s historical behavior to determine the bids. Make sure you choose the right bid optimization goal that is aligned with your budgeting and business goals for Q4 and you’ll do great.
The holiday shopping season, particularly the time surround Black Friday and Cyber Monday, are incredibly important for retailers. Whether you have an online store you want to drive traffic to or a brick and mortar store you want to make sure shoppers are aware of, your PPC ads are the way to make sure you don’t miss out on the boost in revenue you’re looking forward to. Remember- if you aren’t optimizing the best way possible, your fiercest competitor is.
