Leveraging Google Adwords to Convert Holiday Shoppers

Last updated: Paid Search Marketing 3 min read

With the holidays approaching, businesses are wondering how they can attract more shoppers. Shopping never sleeps: According to Google Inside AdWords, one third of all shopping searches on Google happen between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. How can businesses use Adwords to their advantage during the holidays?

Google Adwords for Holidays

Sales Tactics for Adwords

Before we talk about Google Adwords, let’s consider some of the best traditional sales tactics. Urgency, scarcity, incentives, and attracting attention are what I’m referring to. How can we leverage these tactics in the digital space?

Urgency

Besides the absolute deadline of Christmas, other ways to create urgency in Adwords would be using the countdown function to show when a sale ends, or the latest possible time an order can be placed where the items will still arrive before Christmas.

Scarcity

Scarcity can be shown using an Adwords script that displays inventory for items or special promotions for the first X number of people who do Y, such as the first 100 people who order this product will get a free gift.

Incentives

The list of incentives are almost endless. Free shipping, bonus gifts, discounted price, giveaways, personalizing an item such as with a name, or free Christmas gift wrapping just to name a few.

Attracting Attention

Make sure you are taking advantage of every Adwords extension to take up as much real estate as possible and stand out. In particular, the Callout Extension can be a great way to convey your unique selling proposition. Remember that urgency is the name of the game here, along with value. Know what your customers want such as free shipping, fast delivery, free gift wrapping, or whatever your promotions are or what makes your company awesome.

Controlling the Adwords Campaign

You want to make sure everything is being controlled and properly targeted to reduce wasted spend. This isn’t just for the holidays, but all the time with Adwords. There are plenty of ways to control spend and reduce your costs of conversions such as location targeting, timing your ads, targeting demographics and your promotions to the proper segments, match type, site control, mobile apps, budget, keywords, negative keywords, and many more. Everything needs to be controlled and monitored to make sure you’re not wasting money.

Adwords Setup and Preparation for the Holidays

There is a lot to consider going into the Holiday season. With increased sales expected and more search traffic, the first thing to consider is your budget on already existing campaigns, as this will likely need to be higher. New campaigns will need targeted seasonal searches related to gifts, Christmas, xmas, holiday, and other relevant terms, and will also need landing pages for these new terms to keep the quality score up and show that we have content targeting the terms. Don’t forget about long tail keywords that may need to be added for specific products as well. This is the season of research and a lot of people know the exact product they want to buy!

Adwords Campaign Opportunities

This isn’t the time to leave anything on the table or miss any opportunities. If it makes sense for your business, setup Google Shopping campaigns in Adwords. You’ll also need to make sure Remarketing is setup to target past visitors who may have been in the research phase at the time of their visit. This can be taken a lot further with Dynamic Remarketing, where you can target people who viewed a specific product or category. You can also create a Remarketing list based on a specific action, such as adding a product to the shopping cart, but not completing the purchase. This is the list that has the highest chance of regaining customers, as they already thought about buying. Don’t just stop at Remarketing though, hopefully you have setup some kind of email automation to remind these customers that items are in their cart or maybe offer them an additional 5% off to get them to finish their purchase!
Want to learn more about using Google Adwords to convert holiday shoppers? Contact the internet marketing and PPC experts at TheeDigital in Raleigh, NC at 919-341-8901 or schedule a consultation.

Tags: Paid Search Marketing

Richard Horvath

Owner / President

Richard Horvath is the founder of TheeDigital, a Raleigh based award-winning web design and digital marketing agency. He is proud of his team and the results that they provide to their clients.

Related Posts

Merge or Duplicate Google My Business Listings
Google 11 min read

How to Claim or Merge Google Business Listings

Your Google My Business listing is essential for your local SEO strategy. Here's how you can create…
Christopher Lara

Ad Blocker Chrome
Google 4 min read

What Google Chrome Ad Blocking Means for Your Business

Google has released it's ad blocker for Chrome: is this trully beneficial for user experience or is…
Leslie Vegter

Schedule a Consultation