How to Set Your PPC Ads Up for the Holidays

Is this the song you’re singing?

I don’t want a lot for christmas

There is just one thing I need

I don’t care about the presents

Underneath the Christmas tree

I just want PPC success

More than you could ever know

Make my wish come true

All I want for Christmas is PPC success

If it is, we’re here to help. If its not, its time to start singing it because Christmas is right around the corner!

I’m your little Christmas elf here to help you get your PPC ready for the holiday season!

There are just a few things you need to get ready to ensure your holiday PPC season is successful—Research and plan and create holiday campaigns with merry landing pages.

Planning Your Holiday PPC Campaigns

Now is the time to start planning for the 2015 holiday season. In recent years, people have started Christmas shopping earlier and earlier, with some shoppers start before Halloween. You want to capture the early-bird shoppers along with the last-minute and post-Christmas shoppers.

In addition, there are multiple holidays that fall within the holiday shopping season–Kwanzaa, Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Ramadan, and more. If your clientele celebrates any of these holidays, so can you with your sales and promotions.

If you ran paid search campaigns last year, start planning the 2015 holiday season by taking a look at what products sold well, what days had the most sales and best margins, and what promotions you used in 2014.

Next, look at your competitors and what they promoted last year, what days they promoted the most heavily on and what promotions they used. We use Spyfu as a starting point to help us see what our competition and our clients competition is doing.

Finally, use your holiday data, your competitors data, and your data from throughout the first three quarters of 2015 to plan the 2015 holiday season.

• Planning–Plan and schedule key sales dates—Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Post-Christmas Sale, etc.
• Promoting–Create promotions to use for all or each of these days.
• Budgeting–Decide what budget to use for the holiday season and then for each of your key sales dates.

With the planning stage done, you’re ready to prep your campaigns for the holiday season.

Getting Your Holiday Campaigns Ready For The Season

In order to get your campaigns ready for success you first need to decide which types of campaigns will best sell your products. Google has many different types of campaigns you could use to promote your products: Search, Display, Shopping, Remarketing, Gmail Sponsored Promotions, Buy Buttons, etc. Below is how each of them can be used for holiday promotions.

Search

Search campaigns are great for selling all types of products and services. You can choose the keywords you want to target and then target your ads specifically to them. Text ads also let you include count downs to make your holiday offer time-limited–like counting down to the last day you can ship by Christmas.

Ad extensions help your search ads take up more visual real estate in the search results. They also give customers more information about your company’s products and services before they reach your landing page.

• Callout extensions are great for highlighting numbers—holiday discounts and prices, or shipping information.
• Sitelink extensions are best used to highlight specific holiday products or services to customers.
• Call extensions make it easier for a customer to get ahold of your business during the holiday chaos.
• App extensions make it easy to download your app in one click.
• Review extensions show how much better you are than your competition.
• Structured snippet extensions are the newest of the ad extensions. They help customers learn more about your products and services before they click on an ad. You can use them to feature amenities, brands, destinations, services, and more to set you apart from other holiday advertisers.

Display

The display network allows you to visually show your products to those who are looking for holiday deals online. It puts your ad in front of customers when they are browsing on the internet—reading the news, browsing social media, following blogs, and shopping.

The display network typically has a much lower cost per click, but also sees a lower click through rate as well, so it works best for branding around the holiday season.

Shopping

The shopping network is perfect for selling your products online. Users can search for either your product specifically—buy Elvis Santa hat (they exist!)—or more general search terms—buy santa hat.

Remarketing

Remarketing is how you can retarget customers who have visited your website previously–whether during the holiday season or earlier in the year. It keeps you relevant in the mind of your target audience and increases your conversion rate. Remarketing can be done both on the search and the display network.

Gmail Sponsored Promotions

Gmail Sponsored Promotions are a great opportunity to target your competitors brands and show relevant, holiday-related ads to your target audience right in their inbox. For more information about setting up Gmail Sponsored Promotions, check out my post here.

Buy Buttons

Google rolled out Buy Buttons on mobile devices earlier in 2015. It’s still in Beta, but you can get access to it for this holiday season by contacting your Google Representative.

Using these various campaigns together will enhance your reach and your PPC effectiveness. I recommend setting up at least a couple different types of campaigns to get the most out of your holiday season customers. We’d love to help set up your PPC campaigns for success.

Prepping Your Holiday Landing Pages

You want your traffic going to a relevant location once they click on your ad. We use Unbounce to help us create merry and bright landing pages.

Make sure to include your holiday promotion, the specific product or service your ad mentioned on your landing page. Also ensure that your landing page is mobile optimized. Every year more people are shopping on mobile. If you’re site isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be missing lots of sales that your competitors are benefiting from.

Summary

With a little bit of planning, holiday campaigns and landing pages, you can make your Christmas wish come true—PPC success.