As an advertising agency, we need to make sure that all of our client accounts are ready for Christmas. There’s nothing worse than having a campaign run out of budget over Christmas, or not ranking for your best performing keywords. We have a number of steps that you can follow, in order to ensure that your campaigns are ready for the Christmas season.
Budget
Make sure that you are sensible with your budget over the Christmas period. Ensure that all your best campaigns have the recommended amount of budget applied to them; so you can avoid having any search loss. Some advertisers want to scale back their daily spend over the Christmas period. So we would look at keeping the best performing and most important campaigns live, and pausing anything that isn’t up to standards.
It’s also good to think ahead and prep for January. Ensure that you have a strategy planned for January, decide which products you’d like to promote, and what special offers you are likely to run.
Google Shopping
Use Google Shopping to further promote any products/services over Christmas, and highlight any offers using Merchant Promotions. And review any bids that might be below Benchmark CPC, as you want to bid the highest over any competitors in order to get the most ad visibility.
It might also be an idea to set high, medium and low priorities on your shopping campaigns. This way, Google will know which campaign you want to prioritise and show more often.
Ad Copy
Test different versions of ad copy, using various delivery messages, special offers and prices. And you want to create some sort of urgency, by letting potential buyers know how long they have left to order if they want to receive their items before Christmas.
You may also want to make ads that are tailored to Mobile. As most people browse and purchase Christmas presents on their mobile devices. So keep your ads short and sweet, showing potential buyers what you offer on your website.
Ads Extensions
Ad extensions are extremely useful throughout the year, but they are beneficial to any Christmas PPC strategy. Use sitelinks to promote your best products, or any stock that you want to clear before Christmas and any special offers that you might have.
Callout extensions can be used to highlight any unique selling points; whether this is Free Next Day Delivery, Guaranteed Christmas Delivery, No Quibble Returns, Easy Returns etc…
Call extensions are useful as it allows users to call the business directly.
Price extensions can be used to show off your special offers on certain products. So if there are any products that you’d like to push, price extensions can help promote them further.
Structured snippets are used to describe your business, showing people the types of products/services that you sell; which makes the process easier for potential buyers.
Negative Keywords
Ensure you have enough negative keywords added to your campaigns. As you don’t want your budget to be spent on irrelevant search queries. We would recommend creating a negative keyword list, which would contain all the keywords that you don’t want your campaigns to show for. You can then apply this list to every campaign, or where it’s applicable.