Are you making the most of your Christmas sales?

Christmas is upon us, and as everyone knows, it is a peak period for consumer spending. For many webshops, Christmas is a sweet but busy time.

First and foremost, it’s about getting potential customers onto your site rather than your competitors’, and for that, Google Ads can be a powerful tool.

Drive Christmas traffic with Google Ads

When you use Google Ads to attract visitors to your site during the Christmas sales, you are competing with other advertisers. You pay for the traffic, and to some extent, your ad placement is determined by the cost-per-click.

This means that the advertiser with the largest budget has the opportunity to appear at the top and dominate the results. Fortunately, there are also other factors at play. Google is a business and knows that a high cost-per-click does not generate revenue unless someone actually clicks on the ads. That is why they have an algorithm called Quality Score, which helps determine the final click price.

You can read more about Quality Score here.

The expected click-through rate affects your Quality Score, and it is important to make your ad text stand out from the crowd. However, it should not be at any cost, as this is not the only factor that matters. For the Christmas period, it can be a good idea to promote some of the extra services that are particularly attractive at this time of year, such as:

– Do you offer extended exchange and return policies?
– Is it free (or at least easy) to return items?
– Do you offer gift wrapping?
– Do you guarantee delivery before Christmas?

In addition, you should ensure that you are using the available ad extensions that Google may include in your ad to make it more visible in search results.

You can read more about ad extensions here.

One of the newer ad extensions is ‘Structured Snippets’, which allows you to showcase, for example, the brands you stock, the services you offer, or the types of products you have within a given category. See an example below:

When consumers search online during Christmas, they may be looking for inspiration for their own wish lists or trying to find the perfect gift for someone they care about. ‘Structured Snippets’ can therefore help guide visitors in the right direction.

Do your visitors become customers?

Not all visitors will become customers. This is true throughout the year, but especially during the festive season, many are simply in the research phase.

So it is unrealistic to expect all your visitors to become customers at Christmas. However, you can help them along their journey on your website. Attracting traffic is one thing, but retaining visitors and converting them into buyers is another.

Just as it is important to highlight extra Christmas services in your ads, it is perhaps even more important to make these visible on your website. Visitors do not only arrive via Google Ads but also from other channels, giving you more opportunities to promote your Christmas services as traffic builds to your webshop.

Additionally, clearly communicating your services helps visitors feel more confident in making a purchase.

In other words, this could be the deciding factor in whether they choose to buy now – and whether they buy from you.

Make use of visitors who do not convert

As mentioned, a significant amount of traffic during the Christmas period will not be ready to purchase straight away. If there is no intention to buy now, there is unfortunately little you can do.

There can be many reasons why visitors do not purchase immediately, but they may well decide to buy later.

For example, if someone was searching for Christmas gift ideas because they were unsure what to wish for, it is unlikely that they will buy straight away. However, if they do not receive what they wished for, they may well want to buy it for themselves later on.

To encourage these visitors to return, you can run remarketing campaigns targeting previous visitors – either through display banners across the web or via Facebook ads.

You can also use your remarketing list to increase your Google Ads bids for people who have already visited your site. If a customer did not get what they wanted and is now searching for a particular product again, you are more likely to rank higher with your Google Ads.

There is also the option to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter (for example, using an attractive Sleeknote popup), encouraging them to make a purchase at a later date.

Bonus tip: Make the most of those who do buy

It is one thing to build a remarketing list of previous visitors. Your products may not last forever, and even if they do, you probably have other products you would like to sell to customers who have already trusted you with their hard-earned money.

Therefore, you should also create a remarketing list of previous customers. Once you have this in place, you can increase your Google Ads bids for these customers – and why let them shop with a competitor when they have already chosen you before?

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