Google’s top tips for preparing your marketing over the festive period.

In the latest Google Elevenses Livestream, Google shared their top tips on preparing for peak times over the upcoming months. These peak times include Black Friday, Cyber Monday and, most prominently, Christmas. In these times, sales and online purchases rocket, especially online.

On Black Friday, Friday 24th November 2017, £1.23 billion will be made and spent across all industries. More than 4/5 people will do research online prior to buying the product. But on the day, only 34% will shop in-store with 66% shopping online.

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How can you use Peak Times to your benefit?

Around Black Friday and the start of the Festive period, search queries increase causing cost-per-click values to decrease. By increasing and optimizing your company’s online presence you can get maximum clicks, conversions and even revenue around these Peak times.

Sales online are starting earlier each year, seen by the 22.9% year on year growth in November 2016. This means that customers are searching and purchasing in earlier months, rather than leaving it all to December.  So start your winter deals early, whilst maximizing your online presence.

To summarise, everything is online and/or mobile with sales starting early in the winter period.

Google’s tips for setting up for success over peak times:

  1. Understand your search audiences. By using demographic data, establish who your target audience.
  2. Move beyond the ‘last click’ attribute. Look at all interactions by the user, such as conversion paths, to understand how your site is used.
  3. Test using Smart Bidding. Google has many tools to optimise your bidding strategy, including enhanced CPA, target ROAS and target CPA.
  4. Review your shopping feed. Many sales can be lost as a result of unapproved products in your feed. Make sure all are approved and working.
  5. Test your websites speed. By using a simple tool, like Google’s Test My Site, you can make fixes to webpages and mobile sites to ensure quick loading time.
  6. Move beyond search advertising. Adwords offers simple display network marketing for effective last click solutions.

Combine early planning and these essential tips to ensure your business peaks with the Festive times.

(Graph data taken from thebalance.com)