Let’s say you’ve survived through the Black Friday/Cyber Monday online sales rush—or perhaps you made it through, but your SEM eCommerce campaigns didn’t perform exactly as you’d hoped. Now what?
While so much of the focus in holiday digital marketing is on early strategy and prepping for a big Black Friday/Cyber Monday push, there’s still a month after to account for—and many shoppers haven’t even begun purchasing yet. There is still plenty to do between Black Friday and Christmas to set your brand up for a successful holiday season going into the new year.
In this blog, we’ll discuss topics like:
- Bids and budgeting for the holiday season stretch run
- How to identify and fix underperforming Google Ads eCommerce campaigns
- How to deploy and update promotions on Google Ads
- Marketing on Google Ads despite inventory shortages
- Introducing new ad copy and creative late in the game
Whether your holiday campaigns got off to a strong start or you’re looking to make up ground, there is work still to be done. Read on for tips from our team at this crucial time of year. And since we aren’t just an SEM agency, we’ve also got tips for managing paid social media during the holidays stretch run.
Making SEM Budget and Bid Adjustments Between Black Friday and Christmas
As holiday shopping ramps up, it’s essential to monitor your campaigns closely to identify opportunities for scaling your budget. Here are key indicators that signal it’s time to increase your Google Ads spend:
- Higher-than-expected CVRs or Conversion Volumes: If your campaigns are generating more conversions than anticipated, especially compared to the same time last year, this could indicate heightened seasonal demand. Consider the impact of conversion lag when assessing performance trends.
- “Limited by Budget” Flags in Google Ads: Check for budget constraints in your campaigns. If your hourly pacing data reveals that campaigns are capping out early in the day (e.g., midday), you’re likely missing out on valuable traffic during peak shopping hours.
- Daily Performance Exceeding Targets: When key metrics like ROAS, CPA, or conversion rates are significantly outperforming targets, increasing budgets can help capitalize on strong performance while demand is high.
Adjusting budgets strategically during the holidays ensures you don’t miss opportunities to capture increased consumer interest.
Diagnosing Underperformance: Steps to Take When Holiday Revenue Goals Aren’t Being Met
Not every holiday season is a total windfall for every eCommerce brand, and some years, you may find your campaigns falling short of revenue targets, which is never a pleasant surprise. To counteract that issue, you need to audit your account to pinpoint whether the issue lies in scaling or quality.
If Scaling Is the Issue
Are your conversions, revenue, or spend hitting a ceiling? If so, here’s how to approach scaling:
- Check Campaign Pacing: Are all campaigns on track to fully spend their designated budgets? If not, consider adjusting your target ROAS. Lowering your ROAS target can increase auction opportunities, driving more revenue at a lower ROI. The key is to know your floor ROAS or margin to avoid unprofitable trade-offs.
- Expand Keywords and Match Types: Can you broaden match types or add relevant keywords to capture additional traffic?
- Focus on High-Revenue Products: Does your campaign structure prioritize high-AOV or top-performing products? Ensuring these categories receive sufficient budget can maximize revenue potential.
If Ad Quality Is the Issue
Struggling with ad performance? Turn your attention to these areas:
- Refresh Ad Copy and Creative: Stale ads often lead to fatigue. Updating visuals and messaging can reinvigorate performance.
- Reassess Demand Gen and Video Campaigns: Check your frequency ratios. High frequency might signal audience fatigue. Can you expand or refine audience segments to boost reach?
- Review the Search Term Report (STR): Look for wasteful spend on irrelevant queries and add negative keywords where needed.
- Evaluate the Post-Click Experience: Is the user journey seamless after the ad click? Any disruptions—whether technical or UX-related—can undermine conversions.
These diagnostic steps offer a clear path forward when holiday campaigns are underperforming. You or your search engine marketing agency need to identify the problem and then take targeted action to reposition your campaigns for success.
Leveraging Promotions and Discounts to Spark a Last-minute Sales Boost
If your campaigns aren’t plagued by other underlying issues and instead need a simple boost to become more competitive, it’s advisable to introduce additional promotions or become more aggressive in marketing your existing ones. Some of the most effective marketing promotion concepts to boost last-minute holiday sales are:
- Countdowns to ship date in search ads
- Adding “Arrives before Christmas” as a product attribute on your Shopping ads
- Utilizing strikethrough pricing or “Special Offer” attributes on Shopping ads
- Pinning promotions (whether in headlines or extensions) in Paid Search ads
- Leveraging urgent “Flash Sales” 5 days prior to the final shipping date for immediate purchase
- A strong retargeting strategy using YouTube and Demand Gen aimed at users who have taken Add to Cart actions but not completed a purchase
Is There Still Time After Black Friday to Introduce New SEM creative?
With all the preparation that goes into building a strategy before Black Friday/Cyber Monday, it can seem like the span between those events and Christmas itself is too short of a time period to introduce new messaging. But that’s not the case at all.
In fact, keeping creative and messaging fresh during the season is recommended. Users are already getting spammed with constant holiday ads. Brands that can create multiple versions of creative with tailored messaging based on the time of season tend to stick out and perform better than those who use the same stagnant creative for the full season. Feeding the system more creative options and refreshing messaging based on ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ should be a part of the holiday plan and will contribute to overall optimization success.
All that said, a creative and messaging plan should be mapped out and prepped ahead of the holiday season. That plan should include dates of specific creative and messaging flights, as well as, pre-prepared assets for seamless integration into the Google Ads system. A shift in creative will not seem so ‘big’ with a plan in place. For last minute adjustments, keep a testing mindset and test new creative against current creative in-market to ensure you’re leading in this decision with data.
Marketing Around Inventory Shortages During the Holiday Season
Inventory shortages are all-too-common for eCommerce brands during the holiday sales rush, and while it’s nice to sell all of your products, it makes digital marketing more complicated. The last thing you want to do is get users excited for a product that is sold out—that’s how conversion rates crash and users end up frustrated and disinterested in your brand.
Brands need two things: strong communication and a feed management team that is proactive rather than reactive. Your feed management team (either through your agency or a feed management vendor like Feedonomics) should create and monitor automated rules that flag low inventory. If inventory begins to become an issue, strong communication between the agency/vendor and your team will be critical to decide whether those items should be removed from the shopping feed or shuffled into a lower-priority shopping campaign. Whichever you choose, have processes and automations in place ahead of time to save both money and customer satisfaction.
Using this Year’s Outcomes to Inform Next Year’s Holiday Success
As we progress through this holiday season, it’s important to remember what an important opportunity it is to gain insights that will help you out when you’re rolling into the next holiday season. This evaluation isn’t just about identifying what worked—it’s about understanding how to optimize future media mixes, budgets, and goals.
Media Mix and Funnel Performance: Start by assessing your media mix. How much of this year’s success was driven by top-of-funnel eCommerce efforts that built awareness versus bottom-of-funnel tactics that generated direct revenue? Use these insights to plan a balanced media strategy that aligns with next year’s seasonal goals.
Auction Costs and Budgeting: Evaluate how auction dynamics impacted your campaigns by reviewing YoY changes in CPC, CPM, and CPA. Holiday auction costs tend to rise incrementally each year, so incorporate these trends into your budgeting and performance forecasts for the following season.
Key Insights to Extract:
- Customer Segmentation: Break down purchases by new versus returning customers to understand acquisition and loyalty trends.
- Campaign Scalability: Identify which campaigns scaled efficiently and which ones struggled to maintain performance at higher spend levels.
- Creative Performance: Pinpoint your top-performing creatives to inform next year’s messaging and design choices.
- Promotion Analysis: Compare the effectiveness of different holiday promotions to refine your offers.
- Brand Impact: Measure how much of your success was incremental and driven by top-of-funnel branding efforts.
- Peak Revenue Days: Analyze performance between Black Friday and Christmas to identify your highest-revenue days.
- Post-Holiday Trends: Don’t overlook the period after Christmas. Assess budget needs and efficiency requirements to inform planning for year-end campaigns.
Remember, digital marketing is always going to change year over year—the tools, the environment, and the trends. But the holiday season is a great time to see what you can learn about your products, your promotions, and how audiences respond to them. That information will help you build even better performance next year, provided you’ve got the right marketing team in place to capitalize.
If you’re looking for a search engine marketing agency that’s obsessed with continual optimization and year-over-year performance gains, don’t be a last-minute shopper: Consider getting in touch with ADM today to find out what new growth opportunities we can help you find.
