How To Get Your Google Ads Ready For The Holiday Season

The holiday season is rapidly approaching. That means now is the time to start thinking about how you optimise your Google ads to get the best results.

Christmas is a busy time for retailers both online and in-store. Below are some of the key steps you can take today to ensure success over the holidays.

Forecast Your Holiday Ad Budget

The last thing you want over the holiday season is your budget to run out prematurely and your ads to stop showing mid-season.

Compare how your ads performed during Q4 2019. Did you lose impressions the same time last year because you ran out of budget? What would you do differently this year?

While foot traffic is bound to increase during the holiday season, online advertising has gotten even more competitive this year thanks to lockdowns.

Keep that in mind when planning this year’s Google ads budget and make sure you’re allocating enough for your business to remain competitive during the holiday season.

Take Time To Review Your Keywords

Look into how profitable certain keywords were for your business during the last holiday season. These could be branded, seasonal, or product keywords that perform well.

Consider adding your best-performing keywords into specific ad groups to maximise the performance of your holiday campaigns.

Also, consider reviewing your negative keywords at this time of year. There may be broad keywords that you’ve added as negatives to lower your costs during the year.

But it may also be worth broadening your reach during the holidays to account for the increased competition online and to find new customers, depending on your business.

Optimise Your Product Data Feeds

According to Storegrowers, Google Shopping now accounts for 65% of all Google ad clicks.

To make sure your shopping ads have the best chance of success over the holiday season, you need to optimise your product data feeds to maximise the relevance of your ads.

That means ensuring you’re using descriptive product titles, descriptions, high-quality images, up to date pricing, and availability.

Make sure your data is accurate and matches what’s on the landing pages of your site.

Google will not show your shopping ads if there is a mismatch between the two.

Optimise For Mobile Ads

It’s never been more important to have a mobile-friendly shopping experience.

Google reports that 58% of shoppers use their smartphones for shopping-related activities, and over 40% of online transactions are on mobile devices.

That means mobile is too big an opportunity to ignore. But it’s even more important during the holiday season while shoppers are using their phones to find local stores.

Boost your mobile bids for your most popular products to increase your reach and capture more conversions during the peak of the holiday season.

Ensure your mobile site loads quickly and your site is optimised for a mobile shopping experience.

And be sure to add mobile relevant extensions such as locations, call, and app extensions to better engage potential customers while they’re on the go.

Drive Traffic To Your Local Store

As mentioned above, shoppers often use their mobile phones as a guide to local stores.

Google reports mobile search terms like “where to buy”, “open now”, and “store hours” peak as on-the-go shoppers search for products right up until Christmas day.

Use local Google ads to drive traffic into stores on days like weekends. And potentially even ramp up your efforts to drive traffic in-store after holiday shipping deadlines end.

As deadlines get closer to Christmas day there will likely be more people on foot looking for last-minute deals in local stores.

Increase your location bid adjustments in the lead up to Christmas Day to account for increased foot traffic.

Automate Your Bidding Strategy

If you’re not already familiar with Google’s automated bidding strategies, you should take some time to get acquainted.

Over the years, Google has invested heavily in machine learning, using countless amounts of data to create automated strategies that can help you convert more customers.

These range from automated bidding strategies that adjust your bids in the aim of getting more conversions during the day, through to fully automated Smart Shopping Campaigns that ensure the right product is being shown to the right person at the right time.

By automating your bidding process you can focus more on fulfilment, looking for new opportunities, and optimising your ads rather than constantly tweaking your bids.

If you’re not already using automated bidding, make sure you bid aggressively to capture higher converting keywords during the competitive holiday season.

Get More Customers With Retargeting

Most people don’t buy the first product they see online, they shop around for a good deal.

That’s especially true in the lead up to holiday season.

Use this to your advantage by setting up Google remarketing campaigns to target people who visit your site and encourage them to return.

One of the most effective ways to follow up with those visitors and entice them to come back to your site is by setting up a remarketing campaign.

Remarketing allows you to strategically place ads in front of people who’ve interacted with your site to increase brand awareness or remind them to make a purchase.

Use Urgency In Your Copywriting

You should be using conversion based copywriting at all times, but the holiday season is the perfect time to be even more direct.

Are you offering 30% OFF in the lead up to Christmas? Put it in your ads.

Are you offering free shipping before Christmas? Put it in your ads.

Do you only have a certain amount of a particular product? Say it in your ads.

Let people know what deals you’ve got and why they need to take them now, rather than later.

You don’t have a lot of room to play with in your copy so try and communicate the biggest benefit to your customer, and remind them that it’s for a limited time only.

Speak With A Google Ads Expert At Yes Digital Today

Here at Yes Digital, we help create and optimise Google ad campaigns for our clients.

If you want to see how an optimised Google ad campaign can help you bring in a flood of holiday traffic, get in touch for a free no-obligation Strategy Session today.