5 Strategies To Leverage Seasonality in PPC Campaigns

There are tons of strategies to make PPC campaigns more effective out there. While these are incredibly helpful, they always look at the tactics from a blank-slate approach, which doesn’t account for variations in consumer needs.

While you should use techniques like that to strengthen the ground floor of your PPC campaign, you need some strategies that will help you leverage seasonality in your ads through various times of the year, especially the winter holiday season. Here are some methods we think will be the best for you to try out.

Create Holiday-Specific Ads

The first step in tailoring your PPC campaign for upcoming seasons is to create ads that specifically reference the holiday in question. Obviously, the primary one you’ll want to do this for is Christmas. But depending on your business, holidays like Halloween and the 4th of July might also be big selling opportunities for you.

Regardless of the holidays that you decide to target, using phrases that drive people to convert is key. Claiming to have the perfect gifts for loved ones or having an ongoing holiday special are both solid ways to draw people in.

Use Countdowns in Your Ads

If you really want to drive these points home with viewers, you should add a countdown to your advertisements. This will create a fear of missing out, which will make them more likely to react.

Using your ads to let people know that there are only a few days left for your holiday sale is a great way to grab their attention. However, you can overdo that tactic. You can also count down how many days are left for the package to get to a customer’s address on time for the holiday. This creates a lot of FOMO since no one wants to have late presents.

Reactivate Older Keywords

The next strategy to help leverage seasonality in your PPC campaign is to look at your keywords. As the years have passed, you’ve probably retired lots of keywords that either stopped working or were actively hurting your efforts. Now might be a good time to try reactivating some of them.

The reason for this is that during your busy seasons, more people will be searching for those keywords again. Chances are, you’ve had to pause them in the past shortly after your sales started going back down in general. That’s because they only pulled in people who don’t typically search for your products, making some of the more out-there phrases useless during the rest of the year.

Add Broader Keywords

If you want to take this idea a step further, you can take some of your stricter keywords and broaden them a bit. Taking a term from your exact match section and putting it in your phrase or broad match categories could increase the number of interested parties who come to your site.

This is due to the fact that time periods like the winter holiday season have so many people online searching for gifts that you’re bound to get more hits. Not everyone knows exactly what they want this time of year. So if they’re searching for something relatively similar to your product, you might be able to get yourself a sale.

We want to note that this strategy is much riskier, though. Trying to draw in people who aren’t really looking for what you’re selling could negatively impact your site metrics and SEO. If someone who wouldn’t have found your website normally clicks on your ad, sees that your products aren’t for them, and immediately leaves, this tactic will actively hurt your PPC campaign instead of helping it. You’ll need to monitor your results closely if you decide to try it.

Increase Your Ad Budget

Finally, the only thing left to do is increase your ad budget. This is the number one tactic for improving your PPC campaign. Obviously, this comes with the downside of cutting into your own profits. However, if you don’t do this, it will also hurt you since all your competitors will start increasing their own budgets.

That means you’ll win far fewer bids, leading to less visibility and sales. Holidays are the most crucial times of the year to remain competitive, so losing some money to gain a bunch more is a trade-off you’ll have to be willing to make.