It is crazy to think that Christmas is under 2 months away and yet it still feels so far away. As much as this may be true, the preparation for holiday PPC will start to happen very soon, with it starting usually a week or two after Halloween. As with the vast majority of businesses, they will make the majority of their profit in the holiday season, cementing just how important the holiday season is. For this reason, it is vital to your business to maximize your PPC campaign for the holiday season, in order to produce an exceptional return on investment (ROI). With this in mind, here are some great ways to make the most of the holiday season in PPC.

Get Web Users to Your Homepage

Straight away, this should make you cautious since it goes against every fiber in a PPC advertiser’s body. However, what is special about the Christmas period is that the majority of web users are looking to buy things for others without knowing what they actually want to buy, with this compared to the rest of the year, when PPC involves the targeted approach to getting web users to buy something from you.

This makes it clear that it is usually more beneficial to push PPC traffic to a generic homepage, so that they can browse the website to find the right gift for whoever they are purchasing for. If you target these types of consumers too specifically with a specific product landing page, then you may find the exit rate of your landing page increases.

Spread Your Budget Evenly

As with the high demand that comes with the holiday season, you can expect the CPC of keywords to rise increasing the price it costs to run a PPC campaign. With this, it can be all so easy to eat through your PPC budget even before December reaches you. However, as much as you can gain traffic in November for the holiday season, make sure you always leave a good amount, even most, of your budget for December.

When to Stop a Holiday PPC Campaign?

A big inefficiency, I have found, with PPC campaigns around Christmas is the fact that the campaign sometimes continues past the ‘knock-off’ point of Christmas, which is the equivalent of pouring money down the drain. For this reason, choose wisely when you want to stop your campaign based on the below information:

• The last postal delivery – Many advertisers finish their campaigns on the day which represents the last day to get whatever the web user ordered before Christmas (with a delivery on Christmas Eve). For next day deliveries, this usually represents the 23rd December, although this might be earlier if next day delivery is not available.
• Boxing day deals – Boxing day is a massive shopping day simply because it is the first day of sales that creep into the January sales. If you choose to implement a campaign for this, you will need to make sure it loses the Christmas theming and keywords and sticks to post-Christmas instead. This means your campaign can also naturally run into the January sales.