It's that time of year again folks, there's a chill in the air, a 'seasonal' aisle has popped up in your supermarket, Michael Bublé is defrosting as I type. Christmas is upon us.
Of course, for many businesses, Christmas already started months ago with many making preparations well in advance for the holiday season. However, if like many of us here at Adido you've repressed the term 'Christmas' deep into your subconscious, no dramas, you still have time to prepare.
WARNING: MANY (AND OFTEN TERRIBLE) CHRISTMAS PUNS TO FOLLOW.
In the first part of this series, we're focusing on the importance of PPC during the most wonderful time of the year.
PPC is undeniably a vital part of any digital strategy throughout the year, however, it has somewhat of an edge over the festive period as many businesses will throw big bucks at Google Ads to ensure good visibility and lead generation throughout their seasonal peak.
Luckily, at Adido, we've been nominated for 'Best Small PPC agency' in the UK Search Awards, so we like to think that we know a thing or two about how you can ensure your PPC strategy is a success. Hopefully, by the end of this post yule (aha) be able to wrap-up (sorry) a fantastic and festive PPC strategy with confidence.
When looking to create the perfect PPC campaign for Christmas, there are three key areas that you should nail to strike gold (frankincense and myrrh).
Search
There are a variety of actions you can take to ensure that you get the search aspect of your PPC strategy to earn its place on the nice list, as opposed to the naughty. We suggest that you:
- Monitor bids and budgets to capture all relevant traffic & seasonal spikes.
- Find your niche, long-tail keywords to focus on. Keywords such as 'gifts', 'Christmas vouchers', 'toys', and 'Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You' all receive an enormous amount of search volume, but are of little to no value if you're being outbid by major conglomerates.
- Upload ads early to prevent delays in the approval process.
- Use ad customisers to link your ads with your inventory – highlight sale countdown, and last shipping dates, keep deals and pricing up to date, detail the range you are offering and last but not least, push a sense of urgency – ‘hurry, ends today!’ has quite a powerful psychological impact on the shopping world.
- Customise ad extensions to highlight what inventory you have in stock and at which location, and add structured snippets to highlight the wide selection of products you offer.
- Boost your mobile adverts with location, opening times, phone and inventory information to boost footfall in your stores for those on the move.
- Boost mobile bids during the season to enhance direct mobile sales but also be more present in the research stage.
- Push your bids and budgets in the account to ensure maximum impression share and optimum position.
- Hook up your account with smart scripts that can adjust bids and pause/ enable keywords based on your inventory data and other seasonal events.
Shopping
A vital aspect of a very retail-driven time of year, when focusing on shopping we suggest that you focus on:
- Updating your Google merchant feed to include seasonal products.
- Splitting out your campaigns by seasonality, boost the Christmas campaign priority levels and bids to capture as much impression share as possible.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a hugely useful component of any successful PPC strategy, recycling valuable content, particularly to previous customers, is significantly more cost-efficient than constantly trying to acquire new customers. We suggest that you:
- Start remarketing lists to collect enough data in time for the festivities.
- Remarket to previous visitors and customers to boost post-Christmas sales.
- Implement dynamic remarketing to ensure you serve the most relevant ad to every previous interest.
If you bear the above advice in mind its snow joke to say that we're confident that you can make PPC a successful component of your festive digital strategy.
If your business is looking to get more out of its paid marketing strategies then look no further than the team at Adido. Our PPC team have been nominated for several awards on the back of recent work and specialise in anything within paid media, from display ads and remarketing, to paid search and shopping.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS ADIDO GAVE TO ME...
A FESTIVE GUIDE TO PPC.
