Drive Holiday Sales with These 6 Advanced PPC Hacks

The holiday season is coming up quickly and if you haven’t planned out your holiday strategy, now is the time.

To prep for the 2021 holiday season, there are basic tips to incorporate, like reviewing historical data, utilizing holiday keywords, and aligning landing pages. But those tips are really a no-brainer. So here is some high-level advice developed through years of experience that can really boost your performance above competitors this holiday season.

Separate Out Top Campaigns

The holiday season means increased traffic and competition, and as a result, your campaigns will likely run out of budget on the most important days.

When traffic and competition are heavy, you don’t want your top performers to be restricted by a lack of budget. To avoid this, consider separating top performers into their own separate campaigns. This allows you to easily control budget allocation directly for these top-performing campaigns. Take a look at top keywords, ad groups, and targeting, and separate those quick wins into their own campaigns to help drive maximum efficiency and ROAS.

Use Google Shopping Promotions

A lot of companies neglect utilizing shopping promotions during the holidays, either because they can’t figure it out or just forget to set them up in advance. So don’t be that company that is running a 20% discount on site but doesn’t have the same promo displayed in Google Shopping ads and free listings.

Utilizing Google Shopping promotions is a great way to win clicks and stay ahead of the competition. Promotions are available if you have an active product feed in the Google Merchant Center. Once you successfully activate promotions, you can create a variety of different types and set them up in advance so you don’t have to worry about setting them up on the fly.

Stack Search Ads with Shopping Ads

A tried and true strategy that can really help drive results is to stack your Shopping ads with Search ads. This increases the probability of ad clicks, adds a layer of credibility, and ultimately gives your brand more visibility. If it’s too costly to implement this strategy for all of your products, generate a list consisting of top products, niche products, and high-converting products and test the stack strategy for a few in each category to help determine which types of products to focus on.

Get Detailed with Remarketing Audiences

Gone are the days of remarketing to broad audiences like 30-day site visitors and page viewers. As marketers, we have the ability to create very detailed audiences that can result in greater conversion rates and less wasted spend. One must take daily site volume into account in order to create a large enough audience to serve ads to, but that is no excuse not to be detailed. The more detailed you can get with your remarketing audiences the more personalized ads can be, ultimately improving your ROAS.

Think outside of the box for this. Audiences can be built based on time spent on site and page path funnels, and can be layered with interests and behaviors that you know convert. This will help you remarket to higher-quality individuals without wasting money, instead of just remarketing to a broad 30 day site visitor audience which usually has a large number of users who will likely not convert.

Utilize Video

The constant stream of ads nowadays has consumers dealing with ad saturation. It can be difficult to get your brand to stand out and stay top of mind with consumers. Video is a great way to combat this. Stand out from the competition with compelling and eye-catching video ads. Don’t make the excuse that you don’t have any video assets or the ability to make compelling videos—there are tons of free resources from stock videos to free video ad makers that can make this daunting task quick and easy.

Drive Brand Awareness Early

One of the best things you can do leading up to the holiday season is to build some momentum around your brand. This helps get your brand on the consumers’ radar at a cheaper cost before the expensive and crowded holiday season even starts. This will also help you generate enough traffic to build those detailed remarketing audiences mentioned earlier. The more brand awareness you can consistently generate before the holidays, the better chance you have of reaching your goals.

Get Started ASAP

With fewer than 4 weeks until the holiday shopping season kicks off, now is the time to start planning and executing your 2021 advertising strategy.

If you want some help making it happen, reach out to the Hall experts. We can review your past performance to create a holiday strategy tailored to your business with the best chance of success.

See how Hall can help increase your demand.