Are you making the most of your Christmas sales?

Christmas is fast approaching, and as everyone knows, it is an unrivalled shopping season. For many online shops, Christmas is a sweet yet hectic time of year.

First and foremost, it is about ensuring that potential customers visit your site instead of your competitors’, and to achieve this, you can make effective use of Google Ads.

Drive Christmas traffic with Google Ads

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

This means that the advertiser with the largest budget can take the top spot and dominate the search results. Fortunately, other factors are also at play. Google is a business and knows that a high click price does not generate revenue unless someone actually clicks on the adverts. That is why they have an algorithm known as the quality score, which helps determine your final click price.

You can read more about the quality score here.

Expected click-through rate is important for the quality score, so your ad copy needs to stand out. However, it is not the only factor that matters. For the Christmas season, it is a good idea to highlight services that go above and beyond 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?

It is also important to take advantage of ad extensions that Google can include with your advert, making it more visible in the search results.

You can read more about ad extensions here.

One of the newer ad extensions is “Structured snippet extensions”, where you can showcase, for example, which brands you stock, which services you provide, or the types of products you offer within a given category. See an example below:

When consumers search online at Christmas, they may be looking for gift inspiration or searching for the perfect present for a loved one. “Structured snippet extensions” can therefore help guide visitors in the right direction.

Are your visitors becoming customers?

Not all visitors will become customers. This is true throughout the year, but equally during the Christmas period. Many people are only in the research phase at this stage.

It is unrealistic to expect that all your visitors will make a purchase at Christmas. However, you can help guide them on your website. Getting traffic onto your site is one thing, but keeping visitors engaged and encouraging them to buy is another.

Just as it is a good idea to highlight extra Christmas services in your ads, it is perhaps even more important to do so on your website. Visitors come not only from Google Ads but also from other channels where you can easily highlight these services as you attract traffic to your webshop.

Additionally, being transparent about your services helps visitors feel more confident in making a purchase.

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

Make the most of visitors who do not buy

As mentioned, a lot of traffic during the Christmas period comes from visitors who are not ready to purchase for one reason or another. If their intention is not to buy right now, there is often little you can do.

There can be several reasons why people do not purchase immediately – but they may come back later.

For example, someone searching for gift ideas who is unsure what they want is unlikely to buy straight away. If they do not receive what they wished for, they might later decide to buy it for themselves.

To encourage visitors to return, you can use remarketing. This could be with banners across the web or via Facebook ads.

You can also use your remarketing list to increase your Google Ads bids for previous visitors who already know your brand. If a customer has not received what they wanted and is actively searching for a specific product again, your Google Ads will have a higher chance of ranking well.

You might also encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter (for example, with an attractive Sleeknote popup), helping you convert them into customers at a later date.

Bonus tip: Make the most of those who do buy

One thing is to create a remarketing list of previous visitors. Your products probably will not last forever, and even if they do, you likely have other products you would like to sell to those who have already chosen to shop with you.

That is why you should have a remarketing list of previous customers. Once set up, you can bid higher in Google Ads for these users – and why let them go to a competitor when they have already bought from you?

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