Are you looking to optimize your holiday PPC campaign but not sure how to start? In this article, we will share concrete tips from PPC advertising management experts to help you out.

Paid search advertising can help drive revenue for your business, but you need to make sure that you stand out from your competition during holiday shopping weeks. Let’s dive in.

1. Make room in your budget. 

The holiday season is an optimal time to increase clicks, raise conversions, and drive more sales. You need to make room in your budget in order to experience these benefits, though. 

If you are wondering how much money you need to save for November and December, that really depends on past performance. You need to reflect on your campaigns from past years and check the impression share rates as well as clicks during the holiday seasons.

As you look back, consider asking yourself the following questions:

  • Did you bid enough money to maintain your impression share rate?
  • Did you deplete your budget sooner than you expected?
  • Were you bidding too high and didn’t make enough revenue?

Be sure to calculate the revenue that your selected keywords made in previous years. You can do this by checking Google Ads Auction Insights. Here are specific metrics that you should focus on:

  • Impression share rate
  • Average position 
  • Overlap rate
  • Position above rate
  • Top of page rate
  • Outranking share rate

You need to specifically compare the performance on these metrics during the months of November and December versus other months of the year. If your impression share, average position, and other metrics are not up to par during the holidays, you need to make more room in the budget.

You also need to decide if you spent too much money on Google ads.

You should not just assume that the majority of your annual sales will occur during the months before Christmas. You need to strategize. You need to make a concrete monthly budget to make sure that you meet your PPC sales goal. 

2. Raise your bids to make more profit.

If you want to fully understand targeting and bidding opportunities, you need to focus on keyword search volume. Look at your target keywords in Google Trends and try to find a pattern in how search volume changes throughout the year. 

Specific keywords provide more impression opportunities during the holiday season, which is why you should raise your bids for them to get a higher impression share rate and clicks. 

If you notice that certain product-related keywords do not lead to higher search volume or sales during the holidays, you can redistribute ad spend by decreasing bidding on these keywords. You can make these adjustments manually even if you use automated bidding. 

3. Target holiday-specific keywords.

You need to create a campaign that targets holiday-specific keywords for November and December. You can reach a highly targeted audience by doing so and consequently increase conversion rates. 

You do not need to spend too much time creating a holiday PPC campaign. All you really need to do is copy one of your current campaigns, make the keywords more holiday-specific, and make more room in your budget. 

4. Test out new initiatives. 

While you need to compare this year’s holiday PPC campaign to your previous year’s performance, that does not mean you cannot try out new targeting strategies. The holiday season is an optimal time to test out new channels and campaigns.

You will need to set aside a portion of your PPC budget to test out new options, whether that be trying a new targeting strategy or figuring out a new Google Ads feature. Our PPC advertising management experts recommend investing in automated bidding strategies if you haven’t already. 

If you want your business to succeed, you need to optimize your holiday PPC campaigns. We hope this list of tips from our PPC advertising management experts is helpful.