How to Tweak Your PPC Strategy During the Holiday Season

Author: Neil Patel / Source: Quick Sprout

Just like in life, there’s an ebb and flow to marketing success.

That means a huge part of finding success as a marketer is being adaptable.

This allows you to capitalize on trends and strike while the iron is hot.

And if there’s any time of year that impacts sales and marketing, it’s the holidays.

In fact, nearly a fifth (19.2%) of retail sales take place over the holiday season.

It’s big business.

And holiday retail sales are only continuing to grow, which is great news for marketers.

While there was a drop off in 2008 and 2009, during the recession, sales have been growing each year ever since.

Here’s a graph that illustrates that growth:

Of course, you want your slice of the pie.

But to get it, you’ll need to modify your approach in several areas of marketing.

One area in particular is PPC.

When it comes to your PPC campaign, you’ll want to tweak your strategy during the holiday season to cash in on the surplus of sales.

And considering the fact that “PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy than organic visitors,” the holidays are rife with opportunity.

It’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel.

In this post, I’d like to point out some specific adjustments you can make to your PPC strategy that should minimize your CPC, increase your CTR and maximize your ROI.

Start by creating a new campaign

Let’s start with a couple of preliminary steps.

First, I strongly recommend creating an entirely new campaign, specifically designed for the holidays.

This will allow you to shift from the holiday season to the post-holiday season with ease and zero disruption.

It’ll also make it easier to stay organized and will minimize any confusion later on.

And when next year comes around, the campaign will already be set up for you.

If you’re using AdWords, check out this guide for step-by-step instructions on how to create a new campaign.

Analyze last year’s data

This won’t be applicable if this is your first year running a PPC campaign during the holidays.

But if you’ve done it in the past, it’s super helpful to take a look at last year’s, as well as several previous years’, data.

Some specific elements you’ll want to examine are:

• keyword performance
• CPCs
• CTRs
• overall conversion rates

Looking at the CTRs of this list of keywords provides instant insights:

Then write down your top four or five keywords because these can serve as the nucleus of this year’s campaign. You can build around those.

If you notice any keywords that bombed or vastly underperformed, you may want to scrap them because there are bound to be better, more profitable keywords out there.

Use holiday modifiers

Once you’ve analyzed last year’s data, you should have a handful of keywords to focus on.

These are good to go.

But what you can also do is adjust the ad copy of your top performing keywords you use normally throughout the year by adding holiday modifiers to them.

This is pretty easy to do, and some quick keyword research should supply you with plenty of ideas.

Here’s an example.

From your Google Keyword Planner dashboard, enter the term “holidays.”

Scroll down just a bit, and you’ve got hundreds of different keyword ideas to choose from:

Now, all you have to do is add a holiday-related keyword phrase to your existing keyword.

For example, you might use “Holiday deals on [keyword].”

Use Google Trends for insights

Here’s another helpful trick you can use to see how people are responding to certain holiday-related phrases.

Go to Google Trends, and enter a few different search terms you want to compare.

I’ll use…

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