Successful Paid Search Holiday Strategies for eCommerce Brands

According to Mastercard data, U.S. retailers witnessed the strongest holiday season in over six years with shoppers contributing to $850 billion in sales, a 5.1% increase from the previous year. This also rang true for Paid Search eCommerce holiday performance at Rise Interactive. Our eCommerce client portfolio generated an astounding 43% increase in revenue YoY while increasing spend by only 27%, which resulted in a 38% increase in online ROAS.


 
There were a number of contributing factors to yield these impressive 2018 holiday results, but we’re going to focus on a couple key areas.

1. Understanding when to increase daily spend and when to pull back

Leveraging historical data and search trends is critical to understanding which days throughout the holiday period experience the highest amount of competition (leading to higher CPCs) and which days provide the largest return on ad spend.
 
Adobe reported that Black Friday brought in $6.2 billion in online sales, a 24% YoY growth, while Cyber Monday generated a projected $7.9 billion, a 20% YoY increase.
 
Developing a strategy that incorporates each client’s budget and goals with this helpful consumer data is vital for holiday success. A traditional approach for many retailers has been to significantly increase spend during these two crucial shopping dates, but it will come with an increase in competition, resulting in additional spend for each user click.
 
Rise partnered with one of our eCommerce clients to develop a successful holiday strategy that focused on allocating daily spend at the product-category level. This granular approach allowed us to distribute budget to products based on profitability and peak search volume dates which enabled us to drive down costs and increase ROAS by 105%.

2. Ad copy testing with promotional offers and countdown ads

Offering the right message at the right time proves to have great upside when it comes to driving online sales through Paid Search. For one specific eCommerce client, we supported over 60 different product promotions on Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone. These promo offerings were supported across multiple ad formats, including expanded text ads, shopping ads, and ad extensions.
 
Another successful tactic used for a big box retailer was to focus on driving urgency through ad copy messaging with a Google Ads offering called countdown ads. Text ads that advertised the number of days remaining for each promotion generated an 11.2% increase in click through rate compared to standard ads.



There are a multitude of approaches marketers can take when developing a Paid Search holiday strategy for eCommerce companies, but ensuring that you are allocating budget at the right time and delivering appealing messaging to online shoppers is a must!
 
Contact Rise today to learn how we can help scale your Paid Search sales while improving ROAS.

*holiday data represents November 1, 2018 - December 24,2018