As the holiday season is upon us, the buyers are in the market looking for Christmas gifts, New year greetings, pictures, special offers, etc. You can seek efficient digital marketing strategies to improve the performance of PPC campaigns to target these buyers. In this festive season, where there is not much gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas, you can make the most of your ad budget to yield desired results with PPC ads. At this point, having PPC strategies for e-commerce, travel, hospitality, etc., should be of prime concern to build brand awareness, drive traffic to the landing page, increase conversion rate, etc. Going ahead, we will discuss some of the best marketing efforts you can include in the PPC campaign strategy to run holiday ads.

Holiday ads are mainly attributed to luring visitors with the latest marketing trends to attract them to the special festive offers, deals and discounts, thus leading to lead generation, improving online sales, etc. As technological changes keep happening, there are constant changes in the festive gifts, decoration items, etc. You need to choose the holiday-specific keywords to attract the potential customer’s interest to make a click on the holiday ad. You also need to prepare a PPC report to determine how the pre-holiday ad campaign is performing and what changes need to be made to attract more leads during the holiday period. You can then work on PPC planning after studying consumer behavior to present the best holiday ads to the target audience.

Which businesses can benefit the most

The online advertising world becomes more congested during the festive season like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Black Friday, etc. You can analyze last year’s performance of your PPC campaign. Suppose you have included any new product or service in your business. In that case, you can include them in your list to attract many new users to your brand who may have been missed previously. It would also help you increase impression share, boost ROAS, etc. If you have to spend more on bids and budgets running holiday ads, you need not panic as the ads ROI can be higher than expected. To have the maximum benefit of this, you need to have a PPC strategy and work on bid adjustment so that your ads budget does not get wasted. Although various sectors have special planning for advertising during the holidays, listed below are some of the in-demand sectors:

  • Ecommerce marketing – Ecommerce is the process of buying or selling any product or service over the internet. There is a constant increase in e-commerce marketing users and festive seasons are the best time where these companies can take the best advantage. The best part is to offer festive discounts, cashback offers, coupons, etc., to the market audience and engage them with your ad. E-commerce companies have a wide range of products. With the best PPC strategy during the holiday season, you can increase the target audience to the landing page. Suppose that a company is selling clothes, then at the festive season, you can add unique festive designs printed on it to give users a feel of the festive season.
  • Food- The food industry can also propose special offers to the target audience. Demographic targeting can be of prime focus in PPC campaign strategy for this industry. You can offer the users a taste of the local and cultural food of the specific location. You can even prepare a PPC report of what type of food the users like depending on their experience visiting your landing page.
  • Travel – With travel SERPs changing so quickly, you need to have a PPC strategy where the paid opportunities yield the best ROI for your business. While there are many demanded locations to travel in this holiday season, you can even include running ads on travel destinations in recent trends.

To provide the users with the best travel destination, you need to conduct keyword research and choose the relevant high-traffic keywords. Displaying ads with new travel locations gives the visitor an element of surprise, making the visitor click on the ad. You can look for search terms with the latest search trends and optimize the ads to improve the PPC campaign performance. It would be best to target the audience at the early stages of the planning/booking process and nurture leads to take the intended action finally. You can create ad groups and ad campaigns like family holidays, backpacking adventures, etc. You can optimize these ads on Youtube, Facebook and various other social media platforms.

Best holiday PPC planning approach

Top strategies to run holiday ads this festive season - infographic

So, you need to create high-quality images, have ad-relevant content, etc., to make the visitor take the intended action. During the holiday season, displaying deals and offers is of vital importance. It makes the user have a festive vibe which increases the visitor’s chances of getting converted into a customer. All your online advertising efforts would yield the best results depending on how well you optimize the landing page.

You can have eye-centric images, updated content (describing festival offers), etc. You need to make sure that you have mobile-friendly landing pages so that the users can get in touch with your business 24/7 around the globe.

Content

  • Eye-catching ad extensions – Ad extensions are a powerful tool in holiday PPC planning strategies. They provide marketers with additional information to have an idea about the product or services you are offering. Extensions have always been a great way to boost the performance of a PPC campaign and also help in improving the ad rank. With engaging eye-catching ad extensions, the relevant audience can know in advance what type of product or services you are offering and prevent them from going to competitors’ landing pages. When setting ad extensions in Google Ads, you need to keep the extension simple and short so that the message can easily be conveyed to the target audience. Google Ads offers a wide range of ad extensions to best suit your business. Let’s look at some of the extensions you should be implementing this holiday season.
    • Sitelink extensions – ​​Sitelink extensions enable merchants to send users to a specific landing or product page to take the desired action. These extensions allow you to include additional lines to your text ad. Not only does it let you give searchers the ability to choose precisely what they are searching for, but it also boosts the size and overall performance of your ad.

During the holidays, you should be sure to adjust your sitelinks labels to include holiday-specific terminology. You can have holiday-themed landing pages so that the user finds the ad relevant after they click on the ad.

    • Call & location extensions – Call and location extensions do not describe the products you are offering but are used to let users interact with your business. These extensions encourage the audience to contact your company via calls or even reach out to the location if they want a face-to-face personalized experience.

You can provide telephone numbers with the text ads and add your service’s location. On mobile phones, they are displayed as a click-to-call button and on desktops, the whole number will appear. With location extensions, you have to plug in your address and even guide them with a map.

    • Promotion extensions – Promotion extensions are the best to have in your PPC strategy as they help highlight special deals and offers. These ads appear right below your normal text ad. In this holiday season, you can include promotion extensions like “65% off on Christmas”, “grab this offer now”, “50% discount valid till 31dec”, etc. While these promotion extensions can be used around the year, they are the best to grab the user’s attention and generate revenue for your business at these holiday times. Having ad inventory is useful during off-months, which helps drive a lot of traffic, lower CPC, etc., during this season.
  • Proper keyword match blends – When searching for high-traffic keywords, you also need to search the holiday-specific terms. Suppose you are looking for keywords in the keyword planner tool of Google Ads, you can look for suitable seasonal keywords to target. You can add more words other than “gifts,” which specifies targeting keyphrases more specific to your brand. You can be more specific as you like, based on search volume, cost-per-click, etc. Combining these terms with holiday keywords such as “Christmas offer”, “Christmas sale”, “holiday gifts”, etc. would help you in lead generation and improve the performance of your PPC campaign.

keyword optimization

  • Creative ads – The PPC campaign encompasses an influx of competition across all online advertising platforms. It even soars great heights during the holiday season. To attract the maximum number of the target audience to click on your ad, you need to have a PPC strategy that includes writing great ad copies, amazing product or service descriptions, etc. You should focus on creating ads with festive descriptions like images, offers, etc. The ad should be enticing, creating an urgency to convert. The ad should be created keeping in mind that the user has a feeling that they miss out on a good deal if the intended action is not taken.

You should consider preparing a PPC report to analyze the past performance and then prepare a PPC strategy to make the ad relevant to the festive season. You can even consider running these ads on social media platforms so that you can get in touch with potential customers 24/7.

  • Ad retargeting – Retargeting is a form of online advertising that can help you get in touch with the users that left the landing page without taking an intended action. Many users at times reach the landing page, navigate through different sections on the landing page but leave the page without taking any intended action.

Performing retargeting reminds the user about the products or services and getting in touch with them at this festive season with quality offers, increases the chances of the user getting converted into a customer. Ad retargeting helps you to bring them back and avail of your product or services. You can consider reminding them that they have remaining activities to perform. Taking the intended course of action now would help them have added advantages. To build customer loyalty and increase users’ trust with your brand, you can consider convincing your users to offer something extra like ‘avail this offer now’, ‘grab this offer’, etc.

Conversion KPIs indicator

Why have a PPC campaign strategy for holidays?

PPC or pay-per-click advertising places your ads on platforms like Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, social media platforms, etc. You have to pay an amount every time a click is made on the ad. These ads help drive traffic to the landing pages, target visitors in real-time and many other points. With a proper PPC campaign strategy, you can have clear audience insights and conduct keyword research to get in touch with the relevant audience. It is an online marketing strategy different from traditional marketing and helps you showcase your product or services to a wide range of online users.

With a proper PPC campaign strategy, you can achieve the desired ad ROI within hours, days, or weeks. Although there are myths regarding PPC advertising, it is not that only businesses with a huge advertising budget can benefit from this. With proper PPC planning & strategy, you can bid on relevant keywords, improve quality score, lower cost-per-click, etc. In search engine optimization, the focus is to rank the website higher on the SERPs. On the other hand, in PPC advertising, you should focus on improving the ad rank and position so that the user clicks on the ad when they find the product or services they are looking for.

As holidays are only a defined number of days, the PPC campaigns strategy could be the best way to convert visitors into customers. Whether you are using Google Ads or any other platform to run a PPC campaign, you need to update the content, use holiday-specific ad extensions, etc. You can consider running eye-catching video ads, using display ads across the Google display network(GDN), etc., to make the most of your online advertising efforts. Having a PPC strategy would be the best to achieve a good ROI as you can write great ad copies with high buyer intent. Some of the advantages of having a PPC strategy are:

  • Receive clicks quickly – After you have set up the ads in the ad campaign and goes live, the user will start viewing your ad for the product or services you are providing. The more relevant the ad, the higher the chances for the user to click on it. The clicks appear quickly for the relevant ads and you do not have to wait long to drive traffic to the landing page.

enhanced CPC

  • Can be easily measured and tracked – One of the main advantages of online advertising is that you can easily measure and track the performance of your PPC campaign. Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, social media marketing platforms like – Youtube Ads, LinkedIn Ads and many others allow you to track various PPC metrics like impression share, conversion rate, click-through rate, cost-per-acquisition, etc. You can even figure out top-performing keywords, the performance of ad groups and implement PPC strategies to refine the efficiency of a PPC campaign.

accurate analytics on facebook meta

  • Multiple ad formats – At this festive season, you can have the best advantage of using the various ad type and ad formats. PPC encompasses a whole range of different ad formats. You can choose the appropriate ad type depending on the type of product or service you are providing. With the launch of mobile-first indexing, you should optimize the ads for mobile devices. You can run various ad formats like video ads, search ads, display ads, shopping ads, etc., to drive success for your PPC campaign.
  • Demographic targeting – With the help of the location targeting option when creating ads in the PPC campaign, you can target the relevant audience based on age group, location, etc. It would help you work on audience segmentation in your PPC strategy so the irrelevant audience does not click on your ad. As there are various types of keywords, you need to choose the relevant keywords so that your ad budget does not get wasted. You can even add negative keywords so that your holiday ads does not appear for irrelevant keywords.

location defined

Round off

With holidays around the corner, you need to analyze the paid search advertising strategy. Just as there were changes in strategy for digital marketing during coronavirus similarly, you need to have a PPC planning to make the most of your holiday ds. If you find running ads during festival time difficult, getting in touch with a digital marketing agency can help you make the most of holiday ads. The experts can help you with a social media marketing campaign, display ads, content marketing, PPC audit, etc. and create a holiday-tailored PPC campaign strategy to increase online sales.

References

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