Holiday preparations for paid search efforts should be on every digital advertiser’s mind this month.
According to eMarketer, retail sales are expected to decline significantly for the first time since 2009 — they project a 10.5% decrease in U.S. retail sales, to the tune of roughly 571 billion USD. The bright side is that there’s an 18% projected increase in U.S. ecommerce sales. That’s going to make this holiday online shopping season even more important, and busy, than ever before.
A Google-commissioned study with Ipsos found that the vast majority of US shoppers, 69% to be exact, plan to shop online more for the holidays this year.
4 Strategic Marketing Planning Steps
Before we get to paid search planning, it’s important to think about your overall marketing plan, because the decisions you make here will help you plan for your pay-per-click (PPC) efforts.
1. Determine Your Shipping Cut-off Date
If you have a date when you stop guaranteeing arrival by Christmas, make sure you highlight it on your website. With concern about the increased demand for shipping fulfillment and shipping companies not guaranteeing arrival by certain dates, making your shipping cut-off date prominently visible is even more important this year than ever before.
2. Plan Your Promotions and Sales
If you have any holiday offers, the sooner you plan for them, the better. Come up with a calendar now based on key shopping dates, your shipping cutoffs, and insights from your own data over the past years. Share the calendar with key stakeholders in your company, as well as any vendors outside your company that need to know your important dates.
3. Update Your Website to Be Holiday First
4. Consider Free Shipping
In an Amazon Prime-conditioned world, people do not want to pay for shipping. According to the National Retail Federation’s Annual Holiday Survey, 91% of those surveyed plan to take advantage of free shipping. If you aren’t offering free shipping, and your competitors are, you are at a distinct disadvantage.
A few years ago, a client and I conducted an experiment to test free shipping versus a percentage off. Buyers actually saved more if they used the percentage off and paid for shipping, yet free shipping was the clear winner.
6 Paid Search Planning Steps
Now that you’ve thought through your promotions, important dates, and your website is ready — it’s time to tackle your paid search.
1. Update Ad Language
When it comes to PPC, if your promotion runs for less than five to seven days I don’t suggest running ads for it. The nature of PPC means that, with a short promotion, the ads never get a chance to fully get up to speed before the promotion ends and they get shut off.
I highly suggest creating promotion extensions that can be shown on your existing ads.
If your promotion is longer than five to seven days, you should create new ads that highlight your offers. Make sure your new ad copy includes when your offer ends to create a sense of urgency.
In addition, if you have Shopping ads, you can set up promotions in Google Merchant Center and Microsoft Merchant Center. Anything you can do to highlight your sale or promotion will help make your ad stand out to potential customers.
2. Create New Image Ads
Build new holiday-themed ads that highlight your promotions and USPs for any display campaigns, especially for remarketing campaigns. Consider scheduling a series of ads leading up to your shipping cut-off date to promote urgency, and continuing through the post-holiday shopping period. This plan has been successful for my clients in the past and I have seen it in action boosting sales numbers.
3. Add Seasonal Shopping Audiences to Campaigns
Both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising have created audience lists for Black Friday and Christmas shoppers.
Google’s Audiences
Microsoft’s Audiences
Layer some or all of the audiences into your existing search and shopping campaigns — either with a 0% bid adjustment if you just want to observe or with a positive bid adjustment if you want to be more aggressive.
4. Test New Campaign Types
5. Plan to Increase Your Spend
Think about what kind of increased budgets you want — but since this isn’t a typical year, be flexible with your budgets and prepare to increase them even more if necessary to accommodate the extra traffic. You should start to increase your ad spend now if you haven’t already.
According to the Google study referenced earlier, 62% of U.S. shoppers will plan their holiday shopping earlier to avoid items being out of stock.” In a typical year, searches on Black Friday terms start weeks before the actual date, so most likely we will see this trend accelerate when studies are done on the 2020 holiday shopping season.
In addition to budget increases you make now, I highly recommend boosting budgets — and even doubling, in some cases — starting on Thanksgiving. Make sure you watch the ad spend closely through the rest of December, revisiting the calendar with peak search days above.
6. Think Post-Holiday Sales
The National Retail Federation’s survey further found that 68% of shoppers are planning on continuing their buying after December 25th, and 51% say that sales and promotions will get them to actually pull the trigger and buy.
After the holiday rush is over, shoppers begin buying for themselves. Some will have gift cards to spend that are burning holes in their pockets while others will be returning things and want to purchase something else. Since we normally see sales numbers remain high through the second or third week of January, keep your budget elevated to support the post-holiday volume.
Key categories from Microsoft’s internal data from 2019 showed increases in search volume for skincare, haircare, makeup, clothing, home theater audio, and major appliances after December 25th, 2019. It will be interesting to see which categories show volume increases after this unprecedented year.
We can read all of the predictions available, but the truth is that no one really knows exactly how the 2020 holiday shopping season will go. We do know that coming up with a plan using the steps listed above will give you the best chance to take advantage of the large number of online shoppers coming your way.
This content was originally published here.
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