Your Google Ads Christmas To Do List

It’s beginning to look a lot like Chri…OK, I can’t bring myself to finish that. It’s October; in the majority of contexts, excluding marketing, it should be a criminal offence to drop the C word at this time of year. Whilst it’s perfectly fine to let your inner grinch roam free outside of work, Christmas is a huge time of year for a huge proportion of businesses in one way or another. A massive spectrum of ecommerce businesses rely on the final quarter to deliver big traffic figures and impressive revenue. For this reason, your Christmas strategy needs to be on-point, especially when it comes to paid advertising. So where to start?

Planning

Planning on this final quarter should be well underway. Although research suggests that Christmas shopping is done in November and December, a massive 28.1% of people start their Christmas shopping before November – that’s a big market to be missing out on if you haven’t started your Christmas campaigns already.

Key aspects of your Q3 campaign(s) to plan are:

• Your schedule – what are you pushing and when? Brand awareness campaigns before Christmas get you in shoppers’ thoughts, but you also need to consider key promotional dates, including Black Friday, Cyber Monday and even your post-Christmas sales.
• Budgets – use historical data (if available) to establish a budget that is going to provide a great ROI for each campaign.
• Ads and visuals – get ready to create ads that excite and inspire. If there’s any time to intricately plan your display and text ads, now is it!
• Audiences – ideally you will have set up audience observations on your account already. Both in-market audiences and lists imported from the engagement pack from your Analytics account are a great place to start, but if you’re strict on demographic targeting, it’s worth setting these up too.

Implementation

With your schedule in place, complete with budgets and ads for each, you’re ready to roll out your Q3 campaigns that are going to deliver an awesome ROI. If you haven’t already, you’ve imported a whole heap of engagement lists from your Analytics account, you’re closely observing audiences from in-market segments, and you’ve created visuals (if needed) and text ads that are going to blow your audiences away.

Don’t forget to incorporate retargeting into your campaigns as well as needed – check out this awesome article from Wordstream with some home truths about retargeting if you’re not convinced, and don’t forget to exclude converted customers!

Be the Alpha, Experiment with Betas

Google’s responsive 3 headline search ads with longer descriptions are still in beta, and they’re well worth a dabble. You’re looking at more real estate, but bear in mind you have up to 15 variations to write up, so think carefully about different combinations to ensure you’re not repeating the same messages and listing the same USPs.

Test, Test and Test Again

If you’re managing a PPC account for an ecommerce site, now is your time to shine. Frequent testing with different variations and visuals is essential to find the perfect formula that’s going to deliver the best ROI for you this Christmas.