Christmas Marketing Ideas

Top 10 Christmas marketing ideas for your Google Ads campaigns

The online purchasing process during Christmas involves many contact key moments that can affect and influence what users end up buying and where they do it. The first challenge every marketer faces when defining their Christmas Marketing ideas for their Google Ads campaigns is how to stay visible on peak days.

This is where Google comes into play, as the most popular channel to look for Christmas ideas and make purchases online. And I’m not only talking about Google search but also about displaying your products and business on YouTube, Gmail or any other website.

Now let’s check how to adapt your Google Ads campaigns to reach your target audience from the beginning of their purchase funnel when people are still looking around and finding ideas, until the end of the process when they decide to buy your product.

By following these Christmas Marketing ideas you’ll make it easier for them to discover you, get influenced by you in their purchasing decisions and, essentially, boost your sales. Seasonal Marketing is essential! Download our free marketing calendar now and keep track of key dates throughout the year.

Christmas marketing ideas & strategies for your Google Ads

Review your results from previous years

If you had Christmas campaigns active last year it’s worth checking your metrics and asking yourself some questions:

  • What messages worked best?
  • Did the ads displaying product benefits work better than the ones displaying the price?
  • Which keywords had a high performance? Which ones didn’t?
  • Was there any category you found difficult to position your ads in?
  • Did remarketing or shopping work better during that period?
  • What happened in the following days after Christmas?
  • How did your budget and bids for Christmas compare to other non-seasonal periods?

These questions will help you boost those things that worked well for you and, most importantly, stop you from committing the same mistakes you already made in the past. 

It would also be good to download the current information regarding your campaigns before adapting your campaigns and making changes for Christmas, so when you want to reestablish your original campaigns and bids you have all the information saved – just in case.

Budget

We encourage you to raise your budget by 50%, meaning if you were investing $1,000 you’d need to raise your budget to $1,500 as a starting point, and then increase or decrease it according to your performance. 

However, any budget increase regardless of how small it is, will help you improve your competitiveness and will provide you with a higher chance for success.

Put plainly, it makes no sense to invest time and effort to improve your campaigns and adapt them for Christmas if your ads won’t show up due to a lack of budget and low bids

You can check Google’s performance planner to calculate and assign the right budget to your Christmas campaigns.

Ad Copy

Always include the product name, the seasonality (Christmas) and the offer or discount you are offering. Also include additional information regarding any services you provide like free or fast shipping, pick up in-store options, contactless pick up, next day delivery, or any other security/convenience you provide.

This applies both to text and banner ads. To create banner ads easily and fast you can use Clever Ads Banner Creator that allows you to create your campaigns manually or automatically by just entering your URL

This way you can save time on this part of your Christmas marketing ideas and optimizations. You’ll also be able to upload your new generated banner ads directly to your Google Ads campaigns from Clever Ads.

christmas dog gif

Ad Extensions

Learn to personalize your search ads with extensions that won’t only help you improve your CTR by 15% but also give your ads more length to make them more noticeable. There are some ad extensions that are especially useful during this season, for example:

  • Use ad extensions to easily display the business hours for your physical store in your ads.
  • Use location extensions to display where your store is located.
  • Use call extensions to display your business phone number. These extensions are particularly useful for mobile ads because the phone number will be clickable. 
  • Use sitelink extensions so you can bring potential customers to different landing pages on your site. For Christmas most people are searching for ideas and inspiration, so it will be very useful if we provide them different options that could be of interest to them in the same ad.
  • Use price extensions to get more qualified leads like what happens with Shopping ads. When people can see the product and the price before clicking the ad, the clicks you get will be from people that are really interested in your offering – and conversion rates will be higher.
  • Use promotion extensions to display your promotions, discounts, offers and promo codes in your ads directly. People are actively searching for discounted products during Christmas, so it’s a great incentive for them to check out your site. 

Keywords

It’s of utmost importance to research new keywords related to Christmas and Christmas promotions so you take advantage of the huge increase of searches for those keywords. 

Another great Christmas marketing idea is not to focus only on long tail keywords, as we would normally recommend. People are searching for ideas and inspiration, and so they’ll use more generic keywords when doing so. 

If we want to attract customers when they don’t know our brand yet and are in the upper part of the purchasing funnel, we should bid on more generic and wider keywords. It’s important that you choose these types of keywords carefully because if they are not appropriate for your business you could end up wasting your budget unnecessarily. 

Also remember to boost your bids, especially in your long-tail keywords, to keep a decent CTR given Christmas competition gets harder and if you want your ads to show up you’ll need to bid higher for most of your keywords.

You can use our Keyword Planner to find the right keywords for your business during Christmas. You’ll be able to find and filter keywords by entering different terms or a URL (Who said spying your competitors keywords is cheating?). 

Then you can create and combine different keyword lists and upload them directly to your Google Ads campaigns. This will save you tons of time when performing keyword research, as you can forget about downloading, uploading, and managing Excel documents forever.

Shopping

As I already mentioned, Shopping ads have great performance and conversion rates as they provide most of the information consumers need to decide if they are interested in what you offer before even going to your product page.

85% of the traffic coming from Shopping ads to eCommerce sites are from new visitors that search for generic terms like “bags”, “running shoes” or “furniture” to give you some examples. Shopping ads are perfect for unknown brands as they allow you to compete and win against bigger players.

Including promotional tags in your Shopping ads is a must to make your marked down price more visible to consumers. There are other shopping tags you can use to display product reviews and additional information like free shipping. Including shopping tags will also help your ad show up more often.

YouTube

More than 46% of customers use YouTube as a starting point when searching for product ideas. Watching unboxings, tutorials, product reviews, and comparisons helps them make decisions in terms of which products or brands they’ll consider in their purchasing process. That’s why you should be there to influence their decision making from the very beginning of this process. 

For effective video ads, be direct and tell users what you want them to do next with information cards, end screens or CTA overlays. Make it as easy as possible for them to perform the action you want in that exact moment. 

The goal is to convert inspiration.

Local inventory ads

Avoid shoppers from having to guess if your store is open or not, or have the product they want in stock. Local inventory ads highlight information about your business so people searching for what you offer close to you, discover you.

All you have to do is link your Google My Business account with your Merchant Center and your business card will display information about your business schedule, phone number, health and safety information, etc. 

Take into account that 60% of buyers check online if a product is available in store before going there to buy it. And searches like “available near me” grew more than 100% worldwide last year.

Remarketing

Search new segments and attract them during the higher activity days with remarketing lists. The goal is to keep your products and brand in the consumers’ mind so they keep considering you as an option for finally making the purchasing decision

Make sure to use dynamic remarketing so you show people the exact same product they were interested in, and also to include a Christmas discount or offer in the ad text or graphics. 

Mobile

57% of smartphone users buy in brands whose websites or apps allow them to do it fast and easy. Check your site’s speed and learn how to improve it with some tools like test my site or grow my store.

Also take into account that it’s especially relevant to include ad extensions when advertising for mobile as the screen is small and you’ll really make your ad the most visible thing there. 

These are some of the most important Christmas marketing ideas to bear in mind when adapting your Google Ads to boost their performance for Christmas. However if you want to always know how to improve and optimize your Google Ads campaigns, I’d recommend you regularly use our Google Ads Audit

 

 

Are you going to apply any of our Christmas marketing ideas to your campaigns? Can you think of something that we haven’t mentioned? Tell us in the comments!

 

 

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