5 Ways to Optimize PPC Campaigns for Holiday Shoppers
By: Commerce Pundit
Tags: PPC Marketing, Marketing Optimization, PPC, Ppc Optimization, Ecommerce Marketing

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

PPC campaigns are crucial to any digital marketing strategy, especially around the holidays when purchasing is *ahem* slightly up. About half of consumers who come to your site through a PPC ad are more likely to buy than organic traffic. It makes sense, right? They clicked on an ad incentivizing a purchase after all. With the holidays coming up fast, it’s the most critical time of year to optimize your PPC campaign.

Working on your budget is essential, but you need to consider these five factors to optimize your campaign for the holidays entirely.

Keywords

With PPC, it all comes back to keywords, finding the right balance of high enough volume without being too broad. Anyone with a semblance of PPC knowledge will tell you to do your keyword research, test, and refine. It’s a process, but you won’t know what works until you test it.

When finding keywords, don’t forget to include negative keywords. It can be almost as important as the keywords you are using. If you are angling your product as luxury lounge chairs, you don’t want to appear in a search for cheap recliners. It isn’t your target audience, and it only hurts your brand.

For holiday-centric campaigns, it’s also vital to include holiday phrases in your budget. Gift-givers use holiday phrases like “best stocking stuffer ideas” and “top Christmas gifts for techies,” and to run a successfully optimized PPC holiday campaign, you need to include holiday-centric keywords.

Gift-givers

Speaking of gift-givers, they should be one of your target audiences between Labor Day and New Year’s Day; they may even be your primary target audience. So much shopping during the holidays is for friends and family members, so the focus is showing why others would like the product, not the buyers. This is where including words like “gift” or “stocking-stuffer” in your keyword bidding comes in handy.

In addition to keywords, you also need to consider the different types of gift-givers. Some will go out and find gifts for everyone on their own, while others would rather have a list provided to them. Having wish lists available so gift receivers can list out the items in your store they want would make it much more manageable.

Last-Minute Shoppers

Did you know that 40% of all holiday purchases are done in the final ten days before Christmas? Consumers do most Christmas shopping early (jumping on Black Friday deals) or at the last minute.

When shopping at the last minute, the priority is to ensure it gets to the recipient in time for the holiday. Offering a guarantee that their purchase will arrive in time is critical for the last-minute shopper.

They will feel pressured to do their shopping efficiently and prioritize quick shipping. A clearly laid-out flow from ad through to the final purchase helps keep consumers on your site. Using language along the lines of “last-minute deals” in your ad text will help draw them in, then an easy purchase process will get them to convert.

Easy Buying

What’s most important when you buy someone else a gift, whether it’s for Christmas or a birthday? You want to make sure you are getting something that the gift receiver will like, and you want it to arrive in time for the big day.

You aren’t interacting with the person receiving the product, just the person giving the gift. They most likely don’t care about your brand or products, but they care that it is a stress-free buying experience and arrives on time.

Including extensions in PPC ads that advertise free shipping or guaranteed arrival before Christmas are simple ways to win over gift-givers.

At a time of year when consumers are spending more, they will be happy to see any deal they can find at a time of year. 90% of consumers say their most significant incentive to purchase is free shipping -just something to keep in mind.

Holiday-Centric LPs

Once someone clicks through your ad, you need a good landing page, so they convert into a sale instead of just bouncing from your site to another one. After all, that’s what helps the bottom line, not clicks.

Developing landing pages specific for holiday shoppers is key to getting gift-givers to convert into shoppers. The first thing to include is consistent messaging. To make the consumer feel more confident in making a purchase, give them the same message in the ad they clicked on (whether it was 40% off or free shipping) immediately visible by prominently placing it above the fold on the page. And don’t forget a festive theme for the landing page!

It also helps to make sure the LP is mobile-friendly. Consumers may do a quick search on their phone or tablet, and if the LP loads like a desktop page, it will be difficult to read, and they will likely bounce from your site.

Getting your PPC campaign implemented properly is incredibly important to having a successful holiday season. If you target gift-givers and last-minute shoppers, develop quality LPs, use holiday-specific keywords, and make purchasing as easy as possible, you’ll be sailing right into the new year.