The holidays are right around the corner and if you haven’t already done so now is the time to plan for PPC success.

In retail, a year’s worth of revenue can occur in just a few days. How you prepare your campaigns ahead of time is critical. If you were thinking you still have some time to put this off - think again! The more time you give yourself, the stronger the strategy will be behind your holiday campaigns.

So what are a few of the areas we suggest you be thinking about in planning for this holiday season you ask! Well, read on….

Holiday Promotions
If you’re launching specific holiday promotions with time sensitive keywords or dates then we’ll want to make sure to have a campaign ready for it! That may include updating ad text and display banner. Around here we consider the biggest days for online retailers to be Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday and Free Shipping Day. Consider running a promotion especially for one of these big online shopping days!

Holiday Keywords
While we know everyone can’t afford the keyword “black friday deals” we can be bidding on keywords that signify the promotion and intent such as [black friday cookware] for you. In order to capitalize on these searches we’ll want to look at search queries from last year as well as doing keyword research for you. Then we’ll get all these holiday keywords wrapped up in a pretty bow we can reuse next year!

Holiday Extensions & Call Outs
Make sure you’ve got custom ad extensions for the holiday season highlighting any holiday sale or promotions. Take advantage of the newest Adwords Ad Extension featuring Call Outs to gain even more exposure.

Holiday Remarketing
Wrap up your marketing efforts with a highly targeted remarking campaign to maintain your brand/product presence with people who visited your site but didn’t make the purchase. Remember we can build lists based on brands or products viewed, product categories browsed, cart or purchase funnel abandonment, days since last visited, number of visits without a purchase, front end metrics like bounce rate, time on site, pages per visit…really the possibilities are endless.

Holiday Marketing Calendar
Generally speaking, for us search marketers, the holiday season means promotions and expiration dates galore. Add any existing campaigns to manage on top of that and you can see where things could get a bit confusing. We’ve learned the best way to plan for the holidays is to write it all down. So to have a complete understanding of how you’re going to attack the holidays online we suggest recording all holiday related marketing in a calendar.

Holiday Budgets
Make sure to increase your PPC budget to take advantage of the biggest online shopping seasons of the year.
Double check your fiscal year budgets to confirm you’ve got the correct amount to spend, also checking to see if there’s an unused budget (Unused budget? What’s that?)

Online shopping during the holiday season has continued to grow year over year, and this year should be no different. Plan for budget increases, plan to be agile, and plan to have a cup o’ joe ready to go.

We’d like to help you get your PPC plan for the holidays down on paper so we can be working behind the scenes to get your campaigns ready to rake in the cash so give us a call today!