Preparing Your PPC Campaign For Christmas

Some super-organised individuals buy their Christmas presents in the January sales, but for the rest of us the disappearance of Halloween means the time has come to think and plan for Christmas.  In the world of PPC marketing (pay per click marketing) this cannot be a last minute rush around the shops, it needs to be excecuted like a military campaign. For online retailers this should be the climax of the year, feathering their nests comfortably in a warm glow of record breaking profits.

So what should you or your PPC agency be doing now in preparation for a lucrative Christmas? The first step is to look at your PPC account history.  If you carry a similar range of products from year to year your PPC campaign history is a goldmine of information on which to base this year's Christmas PPC advertising plans.  Look at which products sell especially well during the run-up to Christmas, look at their cost per conversion to see if this is acceptable and check out which ad positions were historically your optimum converting positions.

Once you have analysed the data thoroughly the next step is to calculate how many campaigns need to be set up for Christmas within your PPC account and remember the more the merrier. Set up the campaigns according to your website, ideally you should have separate campaigns for each brand you carry so that on a daily basis you can see clearly the strong and the weak performers and adjust accordingly.  

Some retailers may carry a variety of styles of products more so than brands and in this case they should be given their own individual campaigns.  For example a fashion retailer would split campaigns into dresses, skirts, tops etc.

Depending on how much space is available in your PPC account, the official Google limit is 25 live campaigns per account, there are a couple of different ways to allocate your budget according to the performance of keywords and ad groups within your product range.  

Taking the fashion retailer example, the idyllic situation is to know which styles of dresses convert more and a lower cost per conversion.  These could then be separated out into a High Performing Campaign so that you can allocate more budget to them and maximise your returns.  Additionally where possible they should be split into an exact match campaign (keywords which are only exact match) as this avoids unknown elements which can happen with both phrase matches and especially broad matches.

If you have exact match only campaigns you will not need negative keywords.  On your phrase/broad match campaigns here you should have the vast majority of the keywords in phrase match with only one or two broad match keywords to capture fresh data that will be valuable in the future. The phrase/broad match campaigns need time invested to put in as many possible negative keywords that you can find to avoid bad, wasteful traffic.  Drill down into as many long-tail keywords as possible for your positive keywords, bearing in mind that this will save you money on quality score plus will mirror potential customers' thoughts.

What about the Christmas Creative? The Christmas Creative for the ad texts should be the icing on the cake. There is no doubt that the space for ad text is sparse however if the ads are dull and boring, the extensive work on keywords may be wasted.  If your product range is competitive on price always include the price, otherwise you will accrue more curiousity clicks than necessary.  Balance the christmas Creative between vital product information in lingo that connects with your target market, include any unique selling point, a call to action and a bit of Christmas sparkle!  Challenging but remember the kind of ads that grab your attention.

Last but certainly not least are the landing pages. If you didn't jazz them up for Christmas last year do it this year.  Think of it like visiting a friend's house a few days before Christmas and you think "What, no decorations, how sad!"  Customise the landing pages with Christmas cheer and to be in tune with the ad creative messages.  Deep link all ads and keywords to the most specific page; never imagine that your customer will take the time to wander around.

Remember all of this work can be done in the background by keeping the campaigns paused until you are ready to rock and roll for a cracker of a Christmas!