Last Minute Christmas PPC Tips

It’s only a few weeks to Christmas, and you’ve got your Google AdWords campaign running at the moment. It’s just ticking over. But in the run-up to Christmas, all your competitors are going to be making changes to their AdWords accounts to try and get more traffic during this high demand season.

So what can you do to battle against your competitors and capture that extra demand? I’ve put a few tips here on what you can edit on your AdWords account to help with that.

The first one is AdWords extensions. They’re great for making your adverts stand out and adding more content to your advert and above the regular space that you get in the results.

A few extensions that are great to use are the location one. So if you’ve got your shop in the High Street and you want to try and encourage visits to that shop, make sure you’ve got the location extension enabled and set up correctly so when people search for a local business, then the chances are that you’ll appear in the list with your address on it so people can easily see that without having to go to your website and check your contact details page, etc. Even when they’re on the move, on their smart phones, they can see your address on there, and they can even see the map so they can easily find your store in the run-up to Christmas.

Similarly for call extensions, make sure that’s enabled and it’s got the correct phone number on there. If people are frantically looking for their last-minute gift for their loved ones, they’ll do a quick search on Google, and they want to ask you a question about if you’ve got the product in stock, for example, then they can just give you a quick call straight from the advert, again, without having to go through to your website and find the phone number on there.

The last extension is quite a new one. It’s called callout extensions. It gives you additional lines of text under your main two lines of text, which you can put in for USPs and any special offers that you’ve got running, etc. They don’t link through like site links, if you’re familiar with site links. But they kind of stand out because they’re a slightly different colour from the normal text, and it’s a really useful way to put in things such as free delivery or extended return dates over Christmas.

So that’s the top AdWords extensions that I recommend. Moving on to targeting, this is the other side of AdWords optimisation.

Make sure that you’ve experimented with adding additional target keywords in there. So this could be things like “my product Christmas gift” or “my product present.” People will be searching for products that you sell, and they’ll be appending their searches with those terms, “Christmas gift” or “presents.” So if you’re adding those as target keywords, the chances are that you’re going to appear for those and capture that customer.

Similarly, ad text, if you’ve added in the extra keywords, like I just mentioned, make sure you update your ad text to include those. You could edit your headline of your ad to say, “My Product, ideal Christmas gift,” etc. Just describe it as more of a themed, festive Christmas gift, if you like.

Also, in the ad text, although we’ve mentioned callout extensions, you can add in your USPs and special offers and things like that that you’ve got running over Christmas period, and some of the things such as free delivery in time for Christmas. You can add that into your ad text. So make changes to your ad text so they’re relevant to the time of year.

Then to backup what you’ve got here in your ad text, make sure your landing page, the page that people have been sent to from the advert, that it’s updated with the information that you’ve put in your ad text. So add in the information or change the information on your web page so that it shows that you’ve got delivery in time for Christmas and you’ve got longer return dates after Christmas. It gives them peace of mind and makes sure that’s what convinced them to buy from you, basically.

The third area is general AdWords optimisation. There are three things you can do for that. We’ve got maximising your bids. So your competitors are going to be increasing their bids in an effort to beat their competition, or you, during this busy time. They want to make sure they’re going to be appearing as high up as they can and capture the majority of the traffic during this extra demand in the run-up to Christmas. So make sure you increase your bids a little bit more so that you go with them.

You will be paying more per click probably, because there’s more demand out there. But having that higher bid means you’re going to keep in those higher positions where people can click through to your advert in one of those top spaces. So if you don’t increase your bids, you might be at risk of your ad being pushed down due to your competitors increasing their bids. So that’s an easy one to implement, so make sure you do that.

The other one is mobile device targeting. You may or may not have this already. But in the settings for your AdWords campaigns, you can enable it and disable it. I recommend making sure that you are targeting mobile devices with your adverts. You don’t need to necessarily edit your adverts specially for the Christmas period, but just make sure it’s enabled and you’re bidding quite strongly for that. The reason is, because during the run-up to Christmas, people are going to be a lot more busy. They’re going to be out and about. They’re going to be searching for your products or services on their mobile phones. So you want to make sure that you appear on there so people can find your business, not necessarily buy directly from the website, but like I mentioned earlier, they might be looking for a local shop so they can go in and get the gift and not worry about not getting the gift in time for Christmas.

The last one is ad scheduling. You may already be using this for your AdWords account. But you want to make sure that you adjust that scheduling so that it takes into account the extra opening hours and extended shopping times that people are familiar with during the run-up to Christmas. It might be that you’re opening late, so you have to put the time into the scheduling to allow for that, otherwise your ads just won’t be showing at those times. Again, that will help people find your business when they’re busy and they haven’t got time to look during the day and enquire about your products or even buy from you at that time.

So these are the three top tips, really, for making the most of your AdWords campaign during the Christmas run-up. If you do implement these, then I’m pretty sure you’re going to benefit from the extra demand over Christmas and really increase those sales and leads that you desperately need at this time. After Christmas, as we know, business can die out. So you want to make sure you’re hitting those monthly targets.

So yeah, make a note of these. If you want more information about PPC in general or even some more Christmas tips, I believe we’ve got some blog posts on our website. So make sure you subscribe to our blog and to our Koozai TV channel to get all the latest digital marketing tips.