Is Your Pay Per Click Strategy Ready For Christmas? – Christmas PPC

PPC is not just for Christmas, but that’s when most of your sales happen (unless of course you are selling lawn movers, bouncy castles or synthetic grass). If you are an e-commerce provider, yesterday was the best time to get your PPC in shape. The second best time is now. Christmas is just two months away.

Whether or not you have set up your PPC Google Adwords account or not is relevant, you still have time to do it, but you need to be quick, if you want to get on the Christmas bandwagon. According to a Google Insights survey https://www.google.com/think/articles/3-strategies-to-prepare-for-the-holidays.html  nearly half of the participants say they plan to buy Christmas gifts online this year. With up to 40% of this year’s online sales expected to happen during the Christmas shopping season, can you afford not to invest in Paid search? Let’s look at Christmas PPC

Here are 8 things to keep in mind to make your Christmas PPC campaign a success:

 1. Learn From Experience.

If you are a seasoned online retailer with an active Google Adwords account that has been running for more than a year, learn from your experience. Review what worked and what didn’t work last year, look for buying patterns and plan accordingly. Which keywords worked and ad copy worked best? Make sure those campaigns are no longer paused.

2. Budget.

If you rank pretty high for your chosen keywords throughout most of the year, don’t take it for granted during Christmas. Companies invest heavily during the last quarter and competition is overwhelming in almost every sector. Many businesses don’t advertise during the year and only put their campaigns live during the Christmas period, with large budgets and heavy handed bids. Make sure you set aside a substantial amount if you want to stay in the game during this period and fully take advantage of all the potential of the final quarter. It’s expected to be the busiest online Christmas to date.

3. Bigger is not always better.

Unless of course we are talking about the budget for PPC campaigns. Don’t be put off by the big names. Granted, Amazon is pretty hard to beat when it comes to speed of delivery and customer service, but last year 25% of online shoppers purchased from a retailer https://www.google.com/think/articles/3-strategies-to-prepare-for-the-holidays.html  they had never used before. Before Christmas we tend to shop for things we don’t usually buy, so if you can offer what clients are after at a competitive price (which is a deal breaker for almost half of the buyers), their brand loyalty is out of the window. Only 22% of buyers look for the best selection. Don’t forget to upsell and offer as many options per page as possible without cramming it, because 33% of shoppers are researching further purchases at the same time.

4. Google Shopping

If you can handle the slightly more demanding Google Feed requirements https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en for Google shopping https://www.google.com/shopping , now it’s the time to set some budget aside and get on it. We expect this to be one of the best performing features of search this Christmas. If you are already running a Google Shopping campaign, don’t forget to take advantage of dynamic remarketing this Christmas.

5. Adcopy

Create urgency by letting your potential buyers know how long they have left to order if they want to receive their items before Christmas.

Make sure you really pay attention to the wording and keywords you use in your adcopy.

– Make sure you have a list of all the gift-giving holidays people will be shopping from November till Februrary. Lets start you off! We have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, January sales, Valentines day .. although some are busier shopping times than others depending on the target country.

– Make sure you include all common misspellings and consider all terms possible for each event.

– Make a list of all possible gift recipients. Consider the relevancy of your product of course: it will save you a fortune if you don’t invest all your budget bidding on “presents for mum” if you only sell cigars and men scarves. Don’t forget to include co-workers, hairdressers, babysitters etc.

– Use a list of all your products to create Christmas related phrases. Include words like gift, present, stocking filler, etc.

– Make a list of holiday promotions. Go beyond “free shipping” although this always helps. Offer guaranteed delivery before a certain date, whatever holidays you have in mind, also mention gift wrapping if you offer it, see if that makes a difference to click through rates and conversion rates (men are notoriously lazy when it come to wrapping!).

– Utilise the keyword planner tool once you have built a basic list of holiday search terms.

– Once you have built a list of holidays, recipients and offers, mash it all together! When that’s done, plug some of your best finds into Google Insights to get the idea of search volume you can expect. This will help you to budget accordingly.

– Negative keywords are almost as important here as all the good work you’ve done with the positive ones. In order to avoid wasting your holiday budget, you need to keep your traffic as focused as possible. Always be proactive in adding negative keywords. It’s better to be cautious than to find yourself bidding on GIFT on broad match and using up all your budget in hours. You will notice when using Google Keyword Planner (new, fancy name for Google Adword tool), you will see searches for example “homemade gifts”. Unless you offer homemade goods, add this as a negative keyword.

6. Mobile.

We won’t be wasting your time telling you again how important mobile advertising is. Just this one fact: Shopping-related search queries from mobile devices were up 59% year-on-year in July! https://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-mobile-movement.html

You can no longer ignore mobile, and this year with over half of the purchases happening as a result of a mobile search it’s more important than ever to target mobile traffic.

If you are mostly a brick and mortar business, make sure you are registered with Google Places and your business is easy to find for any mobile savvy client. Offer discount for anyone who checks in at your place via Foursquare and other apps.

7. Seasonal Landing Pages.

During Christmas time, it’s hard enough to get your ad seen, so if you succeed to cut through the crowd and competition, and get potential clients on to your site: don’t disappoint. Make it look in line with the season. Converted offers bespoke conversion optimised landing pages from £500.

8. Remarketing.

With all the expected traffic this Christmas, it’s likely there will be campaigns where you run out of budget each day, so make sure to take advantage of search remarketing to keep your ads live.

For more information and help with your Pay Per Click related queries, contact us on hi@converted.co.uk or 0800 228 9122