I don’t need to tell you that the holiday season is busy. Between holiday planning and celebrations, new campaigns, and planning for the next year, Q4 can be a lot of fun, but it can also be hectic. Marketing in the online world is no different.
Digital marketers know to adjust their usual advertising strategies during the holiday season. Companies spend more money on PPC (pay-per-click) ads, ad space is more competitive, and ad costs increase, forcing you to work harder to stand out—and increase your advertising budget to keep winning ad space. And during election years, competition is even more fierce in Q4.
But what does this look like? How much do you really need to increase your ad budget? What can you do to make sure your ads stand out above the rest?
Here are our holiday season PPC strategies to maximize your results this (and every) holiday season.
Remember: You Aren’t Starting from Scratch
Something we often forget when planning holiday campaigns is that we’ve been running campaigns all year! Do you know who doesn’t forget? Google, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, etc. All of the targeting, negative keywords, and campaign learning these platforms have built up will still be there, and you can use it all to your advantage.
Your carefully-planned holiday season PPC strategies will benefit from all of your year-round campaigns. All of your optimizations will help you continue to get the best-quality traffic viewing your ads and clicking through to your website.
Brand new campaigns will still have a learning period, but you can utilize the learnings you and the platforms have gained for a strong start when there is more competition.
When you run ads all year long, you reap the benefits: Stronger campaigns during the holiday season.
Diversify, Diversify, Diversify
It’s crucial to run ads on multiple platforms. This has always been true in marketing and is even more so today, especially with all the changes in privacy and tracking, AI, and how users interact with businesses online.
Consider all types of PPC ads including search, display, video, social, and programmatic. Who is your audience and where do they hang out online?
By running a holistic marketing campaign with a combination of ad types, you increase opportunities for your audience to interact with you throughout the entire customer journey.
How Much Do We Really Need to Increase Budget?
You know the drill. We need more money for ads during the holidays, right? Well, it depends. It is true that ad space is more competitive and costs increase because of holiday ads, but there is a lot to consider before adding thousands of dollars to your budget during this period (especially if you usually function on a smaller marketing budget).
For example, consider:
- Is this a competitive time for your industry in particular, or are you competing with the general attention of the masses?
- Do you have a holiday campaign or promotion to run?
- What are your marketing goals, both for the quarter and the year?
If the holidays are important for your industry, like for eCommerce, Travel & Tourism, and Non-Profit, then you probably have a holiday-specific campaign. In this case, you should consider increasing your budget to help you be competitive.
The amount and allocation of your increased budget depends on the industry and your current budget. Increasing the budget of an existing campaign by up to 20% should keep campaigns from going back into learning mode for too long, allowing the campaign to work at its best for longer.
Another option is to add a new campaign with its own budget. Keep in mind that if this is the route you go, you will need a longer learning period for the platform. A smart solution could also be a combination of these two ideas. Continue running your brand campaign and/or an evergreen campaign with a slight budget increase to counter new competition, and add a holiday-specific campaign that allows you to speak to this season.
Optimization Can Help Reduce Wasted Spend
What if you don’t have more budget? Or if it doesn’t make sense for your business to increase spend during the holiday season? The talk of the season—and a key to running strong campaigns—is how to reduce wasted ad spend through optimization.
If you’re detail-oriented like me, you may love digging into a campaign to find out how the CTR and Conversion Rates have changed over time, and why. It may be competition, rising costs, seasonality, changes in search behavior, creative fatigue, or some combination of these. A lot of this information can be found just by digging into your platform metrics!
Here are a few of the best ways you can regularly optimize holiday season PPC strategies and concentrate your budget on the right audience.
- Analyze market trends and changing search behavior. Where are your competitors bidding, and what opportunities does this provide for you to target?
- Add negative keywords to campaigns and ad groups to stop the wrong traffic from seeing and clicking on your ads.
- Look for new audiences across display, video, and social ad platforms to target or exclude. Platforms update these periodically, providing new opportunities to reach your target audiences.
- Find holes in your funnel by seeing where the low CTR or Conversion Rates are, then optimize ads and landing pages and consider adding branding ads, retargeting ads and email campaigns to improve results.
- Review campaign settings. Platforms are always updating settings and even adding automated settings that may not be working for your campaigns.
Tip: Make sure to allow time for your campaigns to adjust to the edits after making changes.
Make Your Campaign Stick
What is it about certain ad campaigns that stick in your memory? The ones you have to watch to the end, that actually get you to click, or that feel as if they’re talking directly to you? This isn’t due to any single aspect, but rather a combination of factors. For example, your audience, marketing platforms, and the latest marketing trends can all play a role in whether an ad campaign resonates.
To start, you have to know your audience. Where are they online and what do they care about? From there, discover what you can do with ads on those platforms and what is the best way to get noticed.
You should also know the platforms’ restrictions. For example, video ads should be able to grab attention without sound in the first three seconds or people will scroll past them. Additionally, you can’t use all caps on your Google search ad headline or your ad will be rejected.
When crafting campaigns, our creative and digital teams ensure that we have one clear call-to-action (CTA). Then, we work together to determine what the “hook” is for a campaign and how to portray it. The message we send needs to speak directly to a specific audience at the right time according to where they are in the customer journey.
A few questions our team considers when creating campaigns are:
- How do I show the benefits rather than merely telling them about the features?
- How can we make this ad personal to the audience so they connect with it?
- How do we show the audience that our client is an authority in this space?
We’re Ready for the Holidays. Are You?
Need help creating and executing your campaigns this holiday season? Our team of experts are ready to serve as your outsourced marketing team or an extension of your internal team, including creating well-informed holiday season PPC strategies. Reach out now to schedule a 30-minute, no-obligation strategy call. We’ll explore how to effectively maximize your campaign results
