With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and the January Sales just around the corner, now is the time to start optimising your seasonal campaigns for the festive period.
Read on for Rhiannon’s top five tips on making sure your ads convert this (and every) year.
1. Look at your ad spend
Be prepared for an increase in ad spend! Not only because of the changes we’ve seen to online shopping and searches from consumers this year, but this is also the time of year that more and more businesses are advertising online. It’s important that you’re able to compete with them!
It’s always wise to save a little pot of money for extra spend at this time of year as it’s not just Christmas to think about- Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the Boxing Day sales will also need to be covered.
The first thing to work out is how much you’re willing to spend- what’s your maximum budget to get a return? There are a couple of ways you can work this out but a good place to start is by looking at your analytics and seeing what you did last year.
2. Look at your ad copy
You’ll need to make little tweaks to your copy for this time of year, things like adding the word Christmas or Black Friday will help make them relevant to the season. Being relevant and timely will help you to match up with the searches and help you stand out a little bit more from the crowd of advertisers competing for buyers attention!
This doesn’t just go for search ads, it’s also worth thinking about tweaking your copy for shopping, remarketing and display too.
3. Review your landing pages
Once you’ve got people to the website, they need to be able to find what they came for! Look at the journey to make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to get to the product or service that they need. The same goes for the checkout process, you don’t want to be spending all that money to get them to the website, only to fall down at the last hurdle with a difficult checkout process.
Pay close attention to what your landing page has on it and the user journey from there, it’s important to consider mobile as well as desktop here too as we know that mobile searches are rising rapidly from one year to the next!
4. Remarketing
We know what it’s like, someone’s landed on a page, something has distracted them and before you know it, they’ve abandoned the purchase. Get them back to the site! We’re not just talking about general display ads here, again, tailor them to the time of year and what’s going to make you stand out from your competitors. Are you offering 10% off first orders? Or, free shipping? Whatever it is, use those USP’s to get people back to the site to continue with their purchase.
The call to action will be one of the most important parts of these ads, never underestimate the power of giving someone direct instructions.
5. Look at when people are most likely to convert!
You may be able to have a poke around in last years data to find this information, but if it’s not available, don’t worry! You can look at previous months and analytics to find out when people are most active.
But don’t just look at when you get the most clicks. For example, you may find that you’re getting a lot of activity in the small hours of the morning while people are browsing on their phones, but if they’re not checking out until 9 am, you’re better off putting your budget at the later time when the sales will actually be made.
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Hopefully, these tips will show you that optimising your campaigns for this time of year is not only essential but also very simple. This is one of the most competitive times of the year so make sure you’re using your time and budget wisely!
If you’d like some help with your PPC or any form of digital marketing, why not get in touch below? We’d love to hear from you!