Don’t Run Your Holiday PPC Ads Until You Read This

With the arrival of fourth quarter of 2014, winter has already knocked the lanes of our towns with holiday decorations popping up in homes and shops. It’s time for you to prepare optimized pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns that can help in enhancing your revenue and profit gigantically in this holiday season. Holidays are busiest period of the year for the e-commerce advertisers and online retailers as the target customers become very active in this season, thereby increasing the chances of e-commerce store owners to earn maximum profit through their online business.

To help you in gearing up for this holiday season, I am going to list the 7 important tips for creating well-optimized PPC ads that will help in improving your e-commerce sales drastically.

1.Review Your Last Year PPC Ad Campaign’s Performance

Don’t just put your thoughts for devising new ways of creating optimized PPC ad campaigns. Reviewing what you have achieved with your techniques last year plays a significant role in letting you discover your ups and downs. According to a famous quote, “the only source of knowledge is experience”, your past experience always lends you true knowledge. Similarly, your past data collected after analyzing your previous PPC ad campaigns’ performance gives you a clear insight of what you have to do next and what to avoid while creating powerful and effective PPC ad campaigns in this holiday season.

While reviewing the performance of your PPC ad campaigns in last year, it is equally important to concentrate on certain areas, which are mentioned as follows:

• Check out your promotion efforts
• Analyze the crucial days when the traffic was maximum
• Check out the performance of the ad extensions
• Evaluate the maximum sales and leads occurred on particular dates

You must recognize the mistakes committed by you in last holiday season to figure out how you could create more effective and successful PPC ad campaigns for this new holiday season. It is also important that you must know which days of last holiday season have contributed the maximum sales to your business.

Here is the graph, which has been prepared based on the stats from GA analysis for understanding the huge hike in transaction rate during holiday season of last year (2013):

From this graph, you can see that every day up to the first 20 days in the month of December has seen a spectacularly high rise in transaction volume life over the average. You can use this data for creating and promoting your PPC campaigns in this particular time period of this holiday season.

2. Check out the Major Online Shopping Events

Holiday season is meant to fetch a flood of customers to your online store, but there are some specific time periods in a year, when you must concentrate on your PPC Ad campaign efforts to keep your sales up and high for gaining maximum sales. However, you can gain maximum sales for your online store only in holiday season of the year, which includes the most important online shopping events listed as follows:

• Thanksgiving Day
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Green Monday
• First Night of Hanukkah
• Christmas Day

If you know the exact date of these key online shopping events, you can easily implement and modify your online marketing strategies for boosting your sales to a significantly higher level. For example, you can build a PPC Ad campaign especially for targeting events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Green Monday, which will help you in maximizing your sales due to the flood of online shoppers during these shopping events.

3. Build an Effective and Powerful Mobile PPC Strategy

How can we forget talking about mobile phones when it comes to enhancing online sales through PPC ad campaigns? Mobile phones have already taken over the desktops and laptops in terms of internet usage and majority of people prefer to shop from their mobile phones, due to their easy accessibility from anywhere and anytime. The previous holiday season of 2013 has already seen a major boost in mobile shopping and we are expecting that mobile shopping will set new records this holiday season.

Therefore, it is mandatory that you should have effective and powerful Mobile PPC Ad campaigns for improving your potential in this holiday season.

To do so, you must ensure to invest in Mobile Adwords tools also to know and reach the target mobile audience through your efficient mobile PPC ad campaign strategy.

Some key tips for doubling your chances of sales through mobile traffic are:

• Create your PPC ad campaigns for the most important ad locations on the mobile devices.
• You can also customize your mobile advertising experience by using the sitelink and mobile ad preferences.
• Your website’s landing page should be optimized according to the varied screens of the mobile devices for offering enhanced user experience to the mobile device owners.

4. Set up Your Budget for Your Holiday PPC Ads

Budget is of course one of the most important part of any campaigning process. Similar to other PPC campaigns or any other advertising campaigns, it is important to estimate the budget for your holiday PPC ads. It will help you in developing your campaigns accordingly and also help you from falling short of budget at the crucial time of promoting your PPC ads.

For estimating your budget for holiday PPC ads in this season, you can take reference of your last year’s ad investment and performance to know how much you will be required to invest this year. It is also vital that you should keep some money aside for days when you are expected to see a surge in your website’s traffic. Also, make sure to keep your days parting to slash down at times when your ads receive minimum traffic because it will help in maintaining a balance in your budget and expenditure.

5.Use Influencing Ad Extensions to Stand Unique

Your target audiences are surrounded by many of competitors across the globe. Hence, it is important for you to make yourself unique so that you can stand out from the crowd in front of your customers. Try to use a target message with the correct offer to help in making your PPC ad campaigns better. You can do so by analyzing and modifying your existing PPC ad extensions.

Here is an example of using influential ad extension in your PPC ads:

These are some points that you can use while creating your target messages:

• Always use boasting language to explain your advantages so that your customers can easily notice you among your competitors.
• Always keep competitive spirit live in yourself to make your listing unique in the swarming search list.
• Use of review extensions and call outs is important for dominating the SERPs.
• You can also use the local extensions for influencing in-store conversions.

6. Make use of Holiday-Specific PLAs

One of the most important tips for running your holiday PPC ad campaigns successfully in this holiday season is that you must make use of the holiday-specific PLAs (Product Listing Ads), which are considered as unique as compared to other ads. These ads appear different from the standard text ads in search results. You can include information in the form of graphics, images, or texts to make your ads look inimitable from others.

Here is an example of a holiday specific PLA:

PLAs are considered more effective for generating leads and sales for the ecommerce stores. Hence, if you can set up holiday shopping campaign by including these holiday exclusive PLAs, your online sales will drastically improve.

7.Add on Your Holiday Spirit

All your efforts for creating well-optimized holiday PPC ad campaigns will go in vain if you don’t know how to spice up the entire process with holiday spirit. Once, you have set your budget along with the steps required for developing an effective PPC ad campaign, you can start introducing changes in your ad campaigns into the holiday spirit. For example, you can engross holiday greetings in your ads or you can also push your products that are more related with the concern online shopping event.

Unquestionably, holiday season is one of the most demanding periods for all customers, businesses and advertisers. Experts can do this job better. If you really want to compete for grabbing the attention of your target audience, let Google adwords certified professionals manage the campaigns for your business