Google Ads Must-Do’s During the Holiday Season

The joyous occasion of the holiday season pushes businesses to put their best holiday marketing strategies forward. As brands level their advertising efforts, Google Ads becomes a crux to target customers, widen visibility and drive sales.

The retailers who use Google Ad campaigns best during the holiday season can drive a major share of consumer sales and reach.

For that, they need a solid plan to leverage Google Ads to the best of their ability.

Ten Google Ads Must-Do’s For The Holiday Season

In this article, we are going to share with you ten Google ads must-do’s for this Holiday Season.

1. Come up with a Promotional Calendar Early

Having a plan in place that outlines your marketing activities on a month-to-month basis assures that a steady stream of promotion enters the marketplace, keeping you in the minds of your established customers and roping in new ones. The more you talk about your company, the more likely people will overhear and become curious.

A promotional or marketing calendar covers the marketing activities that are planned for a year. A well-planned promotional calendar is a stepping stone for any campaign’s success. You can check out our free holiday marketing guide.

Create a calendar in advance for each specific Holiday and plan everything out to avoid any rush or mess during the peak shopping days. Also, because most people start shopping in August for Holidays, it becomes crucial to prepare a promotional calendar early in the season. From the types of campaigns to the budgets and bidding, everything should be well-planned before kicking off your Holiday marketing strategies.

Tools like Microsoft Excel, Asana and MailChimp can be used to create your marketing calendar.

2. Update your Inventory in Advance

Managing the increased number of shoppers during the season can be challenging if your inventory needs to be updated. That includes every product information to be error-free and updated accurately.

If your customers find items out of stock after clicking on your ads, it can lead to wasted ad spend and poor customer experience. Thus, you need to ensure that your inventory is synced with ad campaigns to maximize sales.

A few steps for updating your inventory are:

Make sure all your products are updated in Google Shopping Feed and none of them are disapproved because of the GMC errors.

If you have a large inventory and make frequent changes to product prices, you can have an automated feed to save time and effort, which you would otherwise have spent manually updating the feed.

3. Create Ad Copies for the Holiday Season

Compelling and engaging ad copies can win over your customers in less time. Your ad copies for the holiday season must stand out from your competitors to attract more customers.

A few pointers for creating attractive and engaging holiday season ad copies are:

4. Conduct Keyword Research for Optimizing your Ads

Choosing the right Keywords to target in your campaigns is one of the most critical factors determining your ad campaigns’ efficiency. There are specific Holiday-specific and current trending keywords that you will bid on in your PPC campaigns.

However, finding the right keywords with high search volumes need thorough research. You can use tools like Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ubersuggest to find the most searched keywords or for competitor research.

Or, you can seek help from digital marketing agencies to help you manage and run your campaigns.

5. Work on Mobile Optimization

During the holiday season, the chances for mobile shopping are higher. Thus, it’s imperative to optimize your ad copies and landing pages for mobile for seamless shopping.

Some of the pointers to keep in mind while working on mobile optimization are:

• The fast loading speed of landing pages on your mobile. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure the page speed of a landing page on your mobile.
• Ensure that your landing page and ads are adaptable to different screen sizes.
• Ensure that ad extensions like call extensions, promotion extensions and site links are visible on your mobile.

6. Implement Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing

This feature of Google Ads helps you to engage with your previous website visitors who didn’t complete the purchase.

Why It Matters More During the Holiday Season?

Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing is especially useful during the holiday season for the following reasons:

• Focus on High-Intent Audience

The holiday season calls for exploring product deals and holiday gifts on various websites. Due to this, some website visitors can leave their carts abandoned after showing interest in a product.

Dynamic Remarketing focuses on targeting visitors who have a history of showing interest in your product or services. It helps to bring such customers back to a website to complete their purchase.

• Customized Ad Experience

With the aid of dynamic remarketing, customized or personalized ads are displayed to a customer. This customized ad experience attracts a user’s attention and increases sales during the holiday season.

• Increase Conversions

There are higher chances for the ones who have already visited your website to complete their purchase than new visitors. Thus, Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing helps you to increase your conversions and return on ad spend (ROAS).

7.Use Ad Extensions in Your Ads

Ad extensions help you add extra information to your ads and improve your ads performance. You can add discount offers on specific holiday ad campaigns to particular web page links, phone numbers and locations using these ad extensions.

Adding extensions will make your ad look more attractive and encourage shoppers to shop from you. So, if you have not yet implemented the extensions to your campaigns, it is time to get set to go with ad extensions.

8. Implement Proper Bidding Strategies

The competition for online sellers increases during the holiday season. Every business owner wants the maximum audience reach and sales during the Holiday marketing season. But, to get the best results out of the season, one needs to go the extra mile to boost their marketing efforts. That also means you need to implement proper bidding strategies for your ads.

Some bidding strategies that you can implement during the holiday season are:

• Maximize conversions– Using this bidding strategy, you get the most conversions within a given budget.
• Target CPA– Google optimizes bids based on previous performance and machine learning algorithms to reach a particular target value. This helps in keeping your budget predictable.
• Enhanced CPC (ECPC)– This is a form of smart bidding technique wherein real-time signals like location, time and device type are used to adjust bids. ECPC’s smart bidding helps in handling fluctuations in budgets during the holiday season.
• Target ROAS– This bidding strategy helps you in attaining a set ROAS value. It is beneficial for use when you have pre-determined revenue goals for ads.

9.Create Special Holiday Campaigns

Special holiday ad campaigns can attract your customers to a large extent. While working on these campaigns, ensure to have campaigns for each holiday.

Some of the holidays you can work on are:

• Easter
• Labor Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Black Friday
• Christmas Eve
• New Years Eve

While creating these campaigns, include festive-theme images to depict a festive mood in your ad copies. You can also incorporate holiday-related keywords like “Black Friday sale” and “Last Minute New Year Gifts” in your campaigns to get more traffic.

10. Ensure that your Landing Page is Well-Optimized and Aligned with your Ad Copy

Having a perfect landing page is a deciding factor for your holiday campaigns to succeed or fail. For this, the information mentioned in your ad copy must align with your landing page’s content.

Conclusion

Now that you have got what to do in your Google ad campaigns, it is time you get your PPC campaigns created with more ease.

However, if you face any struggles or have difficulty bringing traffic to your store, don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. You can connect with us to get industry experts’ advice as we are Google Premier Partners, that makes our services more trustworthy.

We truly understand that every client has specific concerns and requires individualized attention. Thus, we study your business in-depth and provide customized solutions tailored to your requirements.

To read more of our articles on more topics like this, click here.

About The Author

Shubhranjali Nigam

An Engineer who likes to express herself through the art of words. An explorer at heart, she likes watching movies to escape from reality!