AdWords Tips and Tricks for Christmas

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Christmas is approaching, and opportunities to maximize your Adwords campaigns are abundant as ever. It’s best for you to take advantage of the upcoming holiday period to promote your products and/or services online. Below is a cheat sheet to help you maximize your return on investment on your AdWords campaigns during this time leading up to Christmas.

Joe is the CEO of a publication called “Feed”. He’d like to promote the launch of his new product just before Christmas, create a lot of buzz on his site, and boost sales. If Joe wants to be successful with his seasonal campaign, he’s going to have to use a few small tips that will make all the difference in the result of this project. Using a hypothetical example of Joe’s website, let’s explore the “cheat sheet”.

Stand Out

Make your Adwords campaigns unique. There are two key ways you can make sure this applies to your seasonal campaign:

  • Continue to run tests! Within each of your ad groups, make sure you are constantly running at least two different versions of each ad. Once you’ve accumulated enough data to see which of the versions is performing better, remove the weaker variation, and add a new one, and continue testing. Constant testing allows you to improve upon what needs improvement during your campaign’s lifetime.
  • Keep your keyword list as broad as possible. If you see that certain keywords are driving quality traffic and conversion regularly, think about expanding them from Exact Match to Broad Match. This way, your ad will appear under more keywords, generating more traffic.

Joe’s plan: Joe created 12 different variations of each advertisement (using the best keywords and setting them as “partial matches”) for his new product, and eliminate the weaker ones. Then, gradually started adding more variations to see what works better. After a few trials, he found that 6 out of the 11 testing campaigns performed best with partial matches.

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Up your geo targeting game

If you only provide your services within a specific area, you should make the appropriate settings to your campaigns to only display ads to searchers that relate to that particular area. Otherwise, you’ll waste money on clicks generating demand you can’t fill. Also, carefully consider what areas you want to target your campaign in. For example, if your product can only be physically shipped domestically, don’t target international customers.

Joe’s plan: Joe is only interested in US customers at this stage because he is offering free local shipping. He made sure to geo target US consumers so he wouldn’t find himself having to incur additional costs to ship to customers outside the US.

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Make note of the timing of your campaigns’ launches

Timing is everything. Make sure that your ads are running when they are most relevant. For example, on the days leading up toward Christmas, run your campaigns a few days before, or on Boxing Day (the day after Christmas). This is a crucial aspect of maximizing your use of Adwords, because you want to keep campaigns running during a time where your audience will see them and, more importantly, act on them.

Additionally, if you ever want to change your ads at the last moment, just create a variation, instead of editing your ad text. Just try to create new ads to test the performance of several variations of your ads.

Joe’s plan: Joe ran the new product’s campaign on Black Friday, as well as December 20th, before Christmas, and once again on Boxing Day. He also tweaked the variations on each campaign run to see what people had the tendency to go for.

Using these tips this season, Joe is confident he will see better conversion rates. Adwords is a great tool, but if you approach it and use it optimally, your results can be even better than you could ever imagine.

Happy Holidays!

Sinead McIntyre

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