The 2020 holiday season will be unlike any we’ve seen before. Global retail eCommerce sales are expected to grow 16.5% this year, and 72% of holiday shoppers say they will shop more online this season. As such, if you want to stand out and drive more sales this holiday season, executing a highly effective and strategic digital advertising campaign is one of the smartest things you can do for your business.
Now is the time to prepare that campaign. In order to pull it off you’ll need data-backed strategies that are guaranteed to deliver an impact to your customers and your bottom line. To help you do that, we are recommending three proven tactics that you can begin implementing immediately. By using these tactics with the Netsertive advertising platform, we’ve seen incredible results for our clients in the automotive, franchise, and home goods industries.
Tactic 1: Advertise Strategically Across Different Platforms
The best way to reach and convert your online audience is to appeal to them wherever they’re spending time online—and research shows that they’re bouncing all over the Internet. That’s why multi-channel advertising yields such successful results. The more opportunities your business has to reach out and make an impression on potential customers, the more chances you have to convert them.
But it goes beyond taking the same campaign and deploying it on Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Each channel has its own trends and optimization tactics. While your overall advertising campaign needs to follow the same holistic approach, individual ads deployed on specific platforms should adhere to the best practices and strategies specific to that platform.
When using the Netsertive platform to execute multi-channel campaigns, we’ve seen compelling results: for multi-location campaigns, we saw a 10% decrease in Cost Per Lead when deploying a mix of ads on Google Search and Microsoft Advertising. When we compared 2,469 businesses not investing in video with 211 businesses running both paid video advertising and paid search, we discovered that those businesses with video ads had 50% more clicks and 27% more conversions.
Those conversions can quickly translate to sales and increased revenue during a shopping season where 89% of consumers consider online advertising helpful in finding products and promotions online.
Multiple Locations, Multiple Channels, Multiple Budgets
Running a multi-channel campaign for a multi-location business? One of the most important things you can do to optimize your multi-channel campaigns for success is setting an appropriate budget. Set a separate budget per campaign, per platform, per month, and per location.
Tactic 2: Optimize Your Budget While Remaining Flexible with Your Spending
If you’re running ad campaigns using Google Ads, you have a suite of highly refined and helpful tools right at your fingertips. For budget setting specifically, there are a number of ways you can optimize your budget, fine tune your bidding strategy, and save time.
Here are three things you can do in Google Ads to create a smarter and more efficient budget for your campaigns. After all, the greatest ad campaign in the world won’t deliver any results if it has a lackluster budget.
Look Back at Last Year’s Performance
A good place to start is by analyzing your performance last year. While things this year are certainly much different, it’s still good to use last year’s performance as a framework for where you can improve your performance in 2020.
Within Google Ads, add columns to your account and use the impression share metric to determine how your ads compare to your competitors. Using this data, you can easily see how many impressions your ads got compared to the total amount of impressions you were eligible for. From there, you can adjust your budget accordingly based on your goals to garner more impressions—and results.
Aim for a Highly Flexible Budget
If a specific ad or ad campaign is outperforming your original goals, set new goals—and a new budget. Stretch the success of a specific campaign even further by increasing your budget so that it reaches even more consumers.
The more you’re able to touch consumers and expose them to your advertising, the more likely you are to persuade them to convert. For example, around big holiday events like Black Friday, you may need to exceed your original budget in order to capture all possible sales.
Use Auction Insights for a More Detailed Performance Breakdown
To see exactly how your ads stack up compared to your competitors—in terms of ad rank, impression share, top of page rate, and more—check out Google’s Auction Insights tool. This report provides valuable data that can be used to further fine tune your campaign for success. By checking out your competition, you can replicate their successes and avoid their pitfalls.
Tactic 3: Fine Tune Smart Bidding for Seasonality
Google’s Smart Bidding is a great way to optimize your bidding strategy—especially if you don’t have the time or resources to manually stay on top of your bids. To set your business up for even more success this holiday season, fine tune your smart bidding strategy to generate the best possible results.
Here are the two main things we do for our clients: maximize conversion value and target ROAS.
When you set up your Google Ads campaigns, you can set your bid strategy based on the conversion value. You can set this bid to generate the highest conversion value possible that’s still within your budget.
Return on Ad Spend, or ROAS, is how you know whether or not your advertising is effective. When you set up your bid strategy in Google, you can set each auction to maximize potential revenue based on a targeted ROAS. This way you stay within budget while maximizing your dollar for every desired action.
Choose the Digital Advertising Provider with a Proven Track Record
Looking for additional advertising strategies this holiday season? Netsertive can help you optimize a suite of advertising campaigns to help achieve sales and success for your multi-location business. Reach out to our marketing specialists today for a free consultation.
Coleen Kinen-Ferguson
Coleen Kinen-Ferguson is the Inbound Marketing Manager at Netsertive. When she's not busy writing blogs, drafting content strategies, or collaborating with the marketing team, you'll probably find her at the gym practicing aerial acrobatics.
