All I want for Christmas, is an AdWords Campaign

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love sent to me: an email asking if her AdWords campaign was up and running for the peak period! That’s right, it’s Christmas time again and that means being prepared. There are two areas to look at when preparing a seasonal campaign in AdWords, Seasonal Search Trends and Opportunities.

Seasonal Search Trends

In reality, gift-related search activity starts to increase from September onwards and remains high until the end of January, but the real peak is usually between the first and second weeks of December. The other key time in December is the final week before Christmas itself because it is heavily reliant upon where Christmas Day falls.

If you run an e-commerce site your delivery times will dictate where this peak will lie but it can be assumed to be three working days before Christmas Eve, so your ad messaging and landing pages must clearly state delivery and availability during this week.

It’s quite common for search interest in your products or services to spike more than you expected during this period, so the close management of campaigns is a must. One key metric is Impression Share, which can be lost due to budget constraints and so it recommended to un-cap for December.

Opportunities

When using both the Search and/or Content networks at Christmas it’s advisable to create separate adgroups so you can target gift shoppers while managing budgets and Max CPCs effectively. The separation of adgroups also allows you to optimise creatives i.e. test Christmas language and deals like ‘trust me, it’s never too early!’

So, all that’s left to do is prepare your strategy based on the above. It’s as simple as that!

Graham Wilkinson
PPC Account Manager