As a search marketer, ramping up your holiday advertising can help maximize sales. These seven ideas may be useful as you prepare your ad campaigns for the busiest shopping season of the year.

1. Rewrite Your Ad Copy

Your copy should capture the festivity of the season; therefore, think of including words such as ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Christmas.’

Include limited time offers to create urgency. For example, you can say. ‘Shop Now!  Offer Expires in X days.

Describe product attributes such as brand, size, and color.

2. Use Generic Keywords

By using generic terms in your keyword bids, the ad has more opportunities to appear in a variety of searches and convert. Adding a holiday angle to the term also helps attract urgent holiday shoppers, e.g., ‘Christmas toys’ or ‘holiday gift shop.’

3. Use a filter for Holiday Brands

Highlighting the brands that you will be focusing on for the holiday season in your ad account helps reduce distraction from other product categories.

4. Use ad Extensions

Getting the user or potential buyer to the exact information they need reduce your bounce rate and shortens conversion time. Ad extensions allow you to include holiday greetings, special promotions, and callouts for your holiday products.

5. Special Offer Links

Buyers are always looking for a bargain. Adding a ‘special offer’ link to a shopping campaign helps an item stand out more than the rest. Merchant promotions for favorite holiday gift products such as shoes can especially increase conversions.

6. Remarket to Holiday Shoppers

Ad analytics helps you ‘smoke out’ holiday buyers and adjust your bidding strategy. For example:

• Using the Google Analytics’ (GA) Custom Audiences tool can help you target visitors who view holiday pages. This data gives you insights into their buying behavior.
• Smart Lists is another powerful GA feature that analyzes the likelihood of visitor conversions based on data such as location and device used.
• Dynamic Remarketing is also an analytics feature for remarketing based on users’ recent search history.

7. Give Bing a Chance

For Singapore online marketers, up to 30% of holiday search traffic comes from Bing. It is, therefore, a good idea to factor them into your ad campaigns budget. You can easily import campaigns from Google to Bing.

As a parting shot, start your campaigns early, put in the work, and adjust your bidding consistently. Coupled with the above tips, you are bound to enjoy a productive and successful holiday ad season.