But it’s not Christmas yet!
Well – like it or not, people started to plan for Christmas weeks ago…and so should you. Any e-commerce or e-marketing campaign should be taking the yuletide season into account, especially when it comes to choosing keywords for PPC.
So, what do we need to take into account? Firstly, we need to find out which product categories see a jump in interest earlier in the run-up to holiday shopping, contrasting to those where shoppers wait until the last minute
Secondly, even though search engines are used less for researching gift shopping during the summer months, there are periods of elevated activity…we need to know when these are.
Finally, we need to remember that experienced online shoppers who look for deals, rebates, promo codes, reviews, and price comparisons bring out different patterns of action in search engines.
Now let’s use this info to grab a few of the cheaper keywords. Now that you know what’s popular during the xmas season, if any of the popular categories correspond to your business, you can simply add the occasions as modifiers to your existing keywords…instead of ‘Digital camera’ add ‘Christmas digital camera’ & ‘Digital camera Christmas gift’. Compared to ‘Digital camera’ these low hanging keywords will be dirt-cheap.
And finally – get in early before the price of the keywords that you want to use over the season triple or more in price. If your product category begins its holiday rise in October, why stop there? You’ll always have consumers who start their shopping a month or two (or more) earlier than that. And if you’re bidding on your competitors’ keywords, with ad copy that speaks to a forthcoming gifting occasion, you just might succeed in changing their minds and considering your product.
And while we’re on the subject – don’t just use these tactics for Christmas… include birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, wedding showers, etc. If you take all your keywords, add the appropriate “gift” modifiers, and stash them in separate campaigns and ad groups, you can learn a thing or two by rotating unique ad copy and landing pages.