The Match2One Blog

Holiday Guide: 6 Tips to Lift Your Christmas Ad Campaign Results

November 29, 2017

The online world has taking retail by storm this holiday season. If it isn’t obvious by watching online giants like Amazon dominate the E-commerce space, it’s clear as day by looking at the 2016 Black Friday shopping numbers. For the first time ever, more people shopped online than in a store during Black Friday in 2016. Based on the data, the gap will widen, in favor of shopping online.

Luckily, the attention of the consumer is even more focussed online this Christmas season, and digital advertisers have a chance to capitalize on that attention. Here are 6 tips to optimize your ad campaigns this Christmas season.

1. Don’t spend it all at once

People shop online for gifts all month long, not just the days leading up to Christmas. While you should allocate some of your budget to the 18th-24th of December, make sure to spread out the rest over the month, as many people go shopping with weeks to spare before Christmas. A general rule is to kick off your Christmas campaign right after Cyber Monday on November 27th – December 23.

Besides, if you go all in on the 18th-24th, you’ll be buying ads in the most competitive time of the season, likely affecting your ROI. More competition leads to higher prices, but the rewards in sales and bottom line is usually even higher. Make sure you set higher CPM/CPC/CPA goals than you normally do, to ensure visibility and effect.

2. Track Everything

The holidays can bring in tons of traffic through programmatic advertising. Once those people click on an ad, they aren’t worth anything until they eventually make a purchase or become a user of your product. Test your ad performance as well as your landing page conversion rate. How many steps are in your funnel? How can you reduce those steps? How else can you reduce friction? Remember, ads are only as good as the landing page that comes after it.

3. Know Your Customer (KYC)

In even just a few years, consumer behavior can change dramatically. From desktop to mobile, from retail to online, consumer behavior changes every day due to technological advancements. Due to that, It might be a good time to make sure your target audience for your campaigns still have the same characteristics in real life that you think they do. Programmatic advertising algorithms are self-learning and automatically finds your ideal audience profile. The learning you get from what converts in your programmatic advertising campaigns, like geography, time-of-day, websites visited, interest category, click-funnel path, can be used across all of your business, including sales and strategy. Make sure you know everything about them, going past the surface.

You can create customer personas and really get in the shoes of your target audience. What pains do they have? Why do those pains exist? Do they care enough to find a solution to solve those pains? Does one type of customer have a different pain from another? Know your customers, have set personas, so you know your ads are targeting the right people.

All this insight should shape your ad creatives and landing page.

4. Set Up Retargeting For The Ones Who Got Away

Some website visitors who aren’t ready to buy one day might be ready to buy the next week (or month). They just need a little nudge. This is where retargeting comes in handy. Target people who visited your site but didn’t convert. Show them ads to remind them of your site, and when they are ready (which could very well be the case around Christmas time), they will click through on an ad and convert.

5. Diversify Your Marketing Efforts

While programmatic advertising has high ROI, make sure to also schedule some social media posts, and launch email campaigns related to the message in your ads and landing page. The best marketing strategy doesn’t rely solely on one channel, but has a slew of high performing channels than bring in quality traffic.

6. Know That Buying Doesn’t Stop Once The Holidays Are Over

Once the holidays are over, you might look back smiling at your successful campaign that brought in tons of leads. Or, you may have let the heat get the best of you and you didn’t have the holiday season you wanted to. The great news is, people still spend tons of money in the 11 other months of the year, outside of December. Refine your process so for the next Christmas season, you’ll improve tenfold.

The Christmas season is a time to spend a lot of money, and a time for you to capitalize on that customer behavior. Hopefully, this post gave you some practical tips on how to make the most of this Christmas season to bring back the ROI you’re always looking for. Good luck!