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With sales opportunities hitting their yearly highs, businesses should focus on continuously optimizing their digital advertising campaigns to maximize conversions. Here are some tips on key optimization opportunities to watch for during the holidays:

• Inspect Your Mobile Bids

Mobile strategies are hit-or-miss across B2B. Depending on your product or service, some businesses see the bulk of their conversions from mobile while others have moderate success. If you’re in the latter category, you should consider organizing a mobile strategy anyway as the numbers backing mobile shopping are staggering.

Per a study by Google and Nielsen:[2]

• consumers spend over 15-hours researching products and goods on mobile sites and apps.
• 93% of consumers who research on mobile end up purchasing a product or service. Many of these purchases are made in physical stores.

Consider making bid adjustments in key locations and days to make your ads more competitive for mobile devices. This will ensure that your ads are favored in crucial times throughout the holidays.

• Check Your Ad Schedules

The holiday season will see traffic spikes during key times in November through December. Ad schedules and bid adjustments give you greater control over your campaigns spend and increase the quality of your conversions. Knowing when to leverage your budget can help reduce your overall cost-per-acquisition, resulting in a budget that performs for longer throughout the day.

Adjusting Your Schedules

Becoming familiar with your platform’s scheduling features is essential. If you have historical data available, you’ll want to frontload most of your budget on your site’s busiest days of your week. Platforms like Google Adwords allow advertisers to set adjustments between -90% to +900% by the hour. Other platforms like Bing Ads aren’t as granular with their ad scheduling with bid adjustments limited to days of the week. You may need to create multiple versions of a campaign to adjust bids by time of day.

Depending on your product or service, you may see most of your online activity occurring nearing the end of the holiday season. For example, if you’re offering a house cleaning service and are running a special for the holidays, you may want to reserve some of your budget for the end of the season as people prepare their homes for parties and guests. Gradually adjusting your ad schedules to follow trends and increase spending during this time can help keep your business competitive.

• Leverage Geotargeting

Like ad schedules, using geotargets ensures that key regions are excluded or included to maximize the competitiveness of your advertisements. Some digital advertising campaigns target massive regions with exclusive specials like discounted deliveries or third-party co-promotions like profits donated to a local charity. Digital advertising campaigns like these require a high level of geotargeting to be effective.

There are many strategies available when setting up geotargets. We’ve recently dedicated a separate blog to geotargeting strategies which details regional segmentation.  

• Diversify Your Ad Copies

The most important factor to the success of your holiday advertising is your advertisement copy. This is especially true in display advertising and remarketing, where images, videos, and audio are competing for attention.

During the holidays, products and services take on a variety of promotions like limited-time offers, bundles, rebates & discounts, exclusive merchandise, and more. When developing advertisement copies, you’ll want to ensure that all your copies accurately reflect the strongest selling points of the product or service.

For example, you may have two unique ad copies for the same television – one promoting a warranty and the other an online streaming service bundle – you’ll want to bid more on the most successful copy. In this example, if the streaming service bundle has more sales leads, then you may want to consider testing the ad against another promotion like the price discount. Diversifying your ad copies is the best way to ensure that your campaigns maintain optimal conversions. Adding diversity is also a great way to build historical data on promotional packages for next-year.

The holiday season can feel like a rush as businesses stretch their budgets to maximize their sales for the year. The key to a successful digital advertising campaign over the holiday months is biding optimization, responsive targeting, and diligent testing of advertisement copies. Following this checklist can help your business keep CPAs low while keeping an eye out for trending opportunities.  

With 10-years of experience in developing successful digital strategies, Strongpages has generated significant results for clients in a variety of competitive industries. Learn more about how our Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services can help you reach your digital marketing goals, fill out our form and a digital marketing expert will reach you soon!

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[1]“Holiday Marketing Math”. SlideShare. http://www.slideshare.net/Group8A/holiday-marketing-math/6-MORE_CONSUMER_AWARENESSMORE_AD_IMPRESSIONS50
[2]Beth T, Erin D, Kelly S and Nina T. “5 Shopping Trends Marketers Should Watch in 2014”. Google. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/articles/five-holiday-shopping-trends-marketers-should-watch.html