Santa Claus is coming to a town. With Christmas almost upon us, have you geared your PPC strategy to maximise your revenue potential during this lucrative sales period?
Croud’s PPC Executive, Lucy Smallman, shares five tips to achieve optimum performance in your PPC accounts, across the festive period.
1. Plan ahead
Consumers’ festive shopping habits will differ as some might complete all their Christmas purchases months in advance, whilst others will inevitably spend days leading up to Christmas scurrying online for last-minute deals. For this reason, it’s important to identify if there are any key dates that will affect consumer shopping behaviours across all of the markets you’re interested in targeting.
Key dates may include:
- Christmas Eve – Tuesday 24th December 2019
- Christmas Day – Wednesday 25th December 2019
- Boxing Day – Thursday 26th December 2019
- New Year’s Eve – Tuesday 31st December 2019
- New Year’s Day – Wednesday 1st January 2020
2. Expand your audience
A lot of consumers will look for gift inspiration by using extremely broad search terms such as “Best gifts for…..” or “Best place to buy….” during the festive periods. Utilise this by including these terms within your campaigns, in order to increase brand awareness during the holiday season and attract new customers.
Dynamic Search Ad campaigns are also a great method for reaching new audiences, as they display a dynamically generated ad to users search queries to the relevant products which you are advertising on your site. This will also allow you to expand your keyword coverage and identify any new key search trends.
Additionally, you can also expand your current audience by targeting similar audiences. This is done by finding people who have similar search behaviours to your current site visitors. This is a powerful way of reaching valuable potential customers and driving better performance all year round, as well as during the festive period. According to Google, by using similar audiences alongside remarketing, advertisers have typically seen:
- 60% more impressions
- 48% more clicks
- 41% more conversions
3. Loyal customers
Whilst it’s easy to do, it’s important not to forget about your loyal customers over the festive season, as they are already connected to your brand. There are a few ways you can do this, including a reward system for your VIP customers with custom promotions.
In addition, you can use remarketing to target ads towards consumers who have previously shown interest in your product or service. This will increase your chances of conversions by leading these consumers back to your site to complete the purchases they didn’t initially, by showing relevant ads across their different devices.
Alternatively, you could also leverage your remarketing audience data to tweak your ad spend towards new acquisitions, by excluding these users from your ad audience.
Additionally, Smart Shopping is also a great tool for optimising performance over the festive period. These campaigns use a combination of standard shopping and display remarketing campaigns, with automated bidding and ad placement, to promote your most relevant products and services across a range of Google’s sites and networks.
4. On- and offline
80% of sales still happen offline so it is important to take advantage of this. You can bridge the align your on- and offline marketing strategies by leveraging local intent shopping, which increases during peak holiday periods. Local inventory ads and location targeting will help reach consumers who purchase in-store over Christmas. For example, if a customer is shopping near to your store location and searches online for a particular product that you stock, you can ensure that your ads appear in these search results to enhance in-store visits.
5. Personalise ad copy
When creating ad copy for the festive season, it is important to consider the needs of your audience and what you want them to think, feel and do, as well as incorporating festive season-specific messaging. This will help your text stand out to the relevant audiences. Take advantage of any promotional offers that you are running by including dynamic countdown ads to create a sense of urgency and fear of missing out, encouraging the customer to make the purchase imminently.
To find out more about Croud’s PPC services and how we can help you get ready for the festive season get in touch.
