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Have you prepared your accounts for the holiday season? 

Just last year (2018), the holiday season saw a total of $850B in US retail sales. Amazingly so, 61% of purchases were made online from smartphones. 

Additionally, observations show that consumers are searching and purchasing items much earlier than usual. In 2018, 45% of consumers reported having purchased a holiday gift by November 13th. The late Thanksgiving celebration is expected to have a huge impact on the holiday season this year as it shortens the core Holiday shopping period. 

So we’ll ask again, have you prepared your accounts for the holiday season? Advanced planning and strategies will be key to campaigns. Rest assured we’ve provided 3 ways to prepare your Google Ad campaigns for the holiday season:

Accelerate 

This year, you’ll want to launch your holiday campaigns early and finish strong. A varied mix of ongoing thanksgiving promotions, Hanukkah offers, Christmas sale specials, ending with a new year’s discounts. The Holiday season is a marathon, not a sprint. Retailers that pace themselves and consistently show up along the journey will win. 

The preparation for this will include: 

• Updating product feeds
• Making it easy and reliable for inquiring customers, all the way through to driving conversions during and after the peak shopping season.  
• Adding in audiences to ensure you’re connecting with the right shoppers, and realize success at scale.

If you’re a new retailer or want to throw a wider net to reach new customers, now is the time as 66% of shoppers are open to shopping for a new retailer with 30% of them actually sealing the deal.

Connect

Mobile: Delivering fast, frictionless experiences not only improve consumer experiences, but it also results in increased conversions and revenue. Speed and simplicity matter as they allow for a smooth and easy connection with the audience. First impressions matter, which is why it’s important to put your best foot forward. 

This holiday season, guarantee that mobile users will have a positive experience purchasing online. Keep in mind that 51% of holiday traffic is mobile users, accounting for 31% of the online sales revenue.

Keywords: Also, another exercise that’ll help you connect with users will be to increase exposure with new holiday-specific keywords. This doesn’t only include searches for “shopping near me” grown over 200% in the past two years, but also other specific searches such as the examples below tend to spike during the season. Review your keyword list and search terms to add variations that could be valuable for your business.

• free shipping
• discount
• same day shipping
• gift
• promotion 

Drive Action

As mentioned above, this is going to be a long Holiday season. History shows only 18% of shoppers consolidate shopping to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, marking a total of 42% of Holiday shopping completed during these dates. Ergo, you’ll want to prepare with the right amount of products and setting up the appropriate promotions at the right times. Each of these will capture consumers at different entry points in the buyer funnel and subsequently have an impact on each interaction.

Promotion Extensions

Another feature to try is ad extensions as they are an easy, non-time-consuming way to boost your performance and create more appealing ads for the holiday season. This works best for specific promotions and discounts that will make you stand out from your competition and attract more customers to your store or website.

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.

In short, gather round the table and prepare your game plan for this upcoming holiday season? This year is a huge opportunity to get in front of fresh faces and have an impact on your business. To continue to receive posts on best practices and seasonal tips, subscribe to our blog!