A lot of business owners assume that the most lucrative time of the year to do online advertising is in the months leading up to Christmas. They increase their budgets and roll out all the stops to try to appeal to holiday shoppers and then when December 26th rolls around they turn their ads off (or scale them back substantially) and start strategizing for next year. This is especially common with small businesses. However, it may surprise you to learn that the post-holiday shopping surge is almost as big as the rush leading up to Christmas.
Many consumers receive money for the holidays that they then turnaround and spend immediately thereafter. Many people have New Year’s Day off, which makes it a particularly busy time for retail and online shopping. This means that if your ads go dormant after Christmas, you could be missing substantial revenue. The first step in making sure that you’re ready for these shoppers is just simply to keep your PPC ads running, but the second step is to modify your current holiday efforts.
Many consumers receive money for the holidays that they then turnaround and spend immediately thereafter. Many people have New Year’s Day off, which makes it a particularly busy time for retail and online shopping. This means that if your ads go dormant after Christmas, you could be missing substantial revenue. The first step in making sure that you’re ready for these shoppers is just simply to keep your PPC ads running, but the second step is to modify your current holiday efforts.
Refined Keyword List
Typically, people will give the gift of money when they’re not sure what someone wants but they know the recipient has a specific item in mind. Sometimes the recipient has been saving up for a certain product, and other times the product is something that the gift giver doesn’t know enough about to buy themselves. Either way, the gift recipients know exactly what they want, which means they know exactly how to search for that item. For this reason, it makes sense to pause the more general gift-related keywords that you had been running earlier in the season. For example, someone that wants a Kitchenaid Tilt-Head Artisan Stand Mixer will search for that directly to find the best deal or the fastest shipping rather than searching for “gifts for home cooks.”
Among the rest of your keywords, you can use the rich data that you accumulated throughout the holidays to further refine your keyword list. Weed out underperformers and increase bids on your most profitable keywords to secure prominent ad placements.
Fresh New Ad Text
Some companies will just recycle their ad text from earlier in the season to save time. However, this old ad text may be outdated or reference promotional codes and offers that aren’t valid any longer. To avoid running stale, ineffective ads, create new ads for the post-holiday season. You may even want to reference the season by saying something like “Start your year off right by…” or “Holiday money burning a hole in your pocket?” or “Life is too short to go another year without…” These ads are sure to catch the eyes of after-Christmas shoppers.
Increased Budget
Scaling back your budget right after the holidays will cause your ads to lose impressions, which is the last thing you want. For this reason, you should leave budgets bumped up their pre-holiday levels until at least mid-January. There’s no harm in carrying your higher than average holiday budget into next year because when search volume drops off, the remainder of the budget won’t get spent.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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