PPC Top Tips for Using Your Promotional Calendar to Good Effect This Christmas

Joe Farley, paid search manager at ClickThrough, explains why it is important to have a promotional calendar that works with your PPC campaigns, and how this can be used to set and achieve targets throughout the year.

It’s that time of year again. Most retailers might fear or relish big sales days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as the common feeling of product scarcity is apparent and consumer excitement grows. These potential customers would not feel that sense of urgency without advertising - or more importantly, the advertiser’s planning and promotional calendar.

Planning your promotional calendar should revolve around your targets and relate to your historical data. Look at seasonal trends and try to offer users what they may need at that time of year, whether that is the new TV they have been saving for or discounted Christmas gifts for their loved ones.

Using PPC to Promote Your Offers

Once the offers and the strategy have been finalised, it must be rolled out to the website, offline and all other channels. Having worked in PPC for a number of years now, supporting an offer through paid activity is a key method of ensuring a successful campaign. PPC can be used to push an offer through a search text ad. This is one of the most relevant types of online advertising due to the user actively looking for the product that you sell.

Taking advantage of Google Shopping in Q4 is key for any retailer. User searches match to products on your site, allowing them to easily compare prices and find the retailer they often prefer to buy through. Once they have clicked through an ad, a user is directed to the product that they have clicked on. There is a feature within the Merchant Centre, which is called Merchant Promotions. It is used to add an effective promotion to a Google Shopping campaign.

As an example, it gives you an opportunity to align with your promotional calendar by allowing a selection of products to have a snippet of information with your offer, such as “10% off for a limited time!”

Remarketing at Christmas

All great strategies (especially around Christmas) include some sort of remarketing campaign. Whether you have static banners and text ads promoting your latest deals or use a dynamic remarketing platform with the recent price drop of a product recently viewed. Both strategies are very effective. Not having one or both of these types of campaign could hinder your performance as the campaigns not only drive direct response, they also drive brand awareness.

The promotional calendar can be extremely effective in this circumstance as a user may deem a product too expensive in the initial site interaction. If the remarketing ad specifies that this product now has 20% off all products, they are much more likely to return to the site and place an order.

A well thought out strategy with the support of PPC can really drive a campaign forward. Here are a few key things to take away:

• Plan the promotional calendar around performance of previous campaigns
• Give people what they want/need (in terms of offers)
• Ensure text ads cover all possible promotions.
• Use remarketing campaigns to tell users why they should come back to your website

Implement the above and enjoy a successful and profitable Christmas.

Not sure how to use remarketing ads or optimise your Google Shopping feed? Don’t miss out on sales – contact our paid search team today.