Beyond Holiday: Transform Q4 Learnings into Evergreen Paid Search Strategy
We’re well into the new year, and you’ve probably packed your holiday sales and strategies away along with your wrapping paper, ornaments, and cookie cutters.
Search marketers usually pull out all the stops for the end of the year to make the most of the gift-buying rush–but why wait around all year to use these “holiday” tactics when you can use them to optimize your search strategy right now?
These strategies aren’t just for Q4, they’re evergreen: powerful tactics that can drive more efficient ad spend, increase conversions, and give you a competitive edge at any time of year.
From refreshing your messaging to setting max CPC bid limits, we’re breaking down top search tactics you should be implementing now so you can keep that holiday marketing magic all year round.
Big deals: converting holiday sales and promotions to evergreen discounts
Many brands save their biggest deals for holiday peaks like Black Friday, but there are opportunities to deploy smart sales, discounts, and other promotional tactics all year round.
Source: MagicBrief
Remember that gift shopping doesn’t stop with the holidays. If your brand offers gift cards, you should be marketing them year-round so customers know they’re available for events like birthdays, anniversaries, or other holidays.
When you’re running key promotions, you should also consider pausing low-CTR evergreen extensions to maximize visibility for your most relevant and high-performing ad assets, like sitelinks and callout extensions.
Pausing underperforming extensions cuts down on clutter and brings more attention to the extensions most likely to drive clicks and conversions, so you get the most out of your ad dollars. This also improves the user experience by serving streamlined ads relevant to your audience’s needs and interests, directing more traffic to the promotional offers or landing pages you’re focusing on.
You should also keep an eye on your top competitors’ promotional calendars throughout the year. By staying up to date on other brands’ strategies on the SERP, you can get a clear picture of the types of ads that are reaching your brand’s target audiences right now.
We’re not telling you to simply copy what everyone else is doing: instead, look for messaging that is trendy or overused and what gaps your brand can take advantage of to stand out.
There are lots of ways to keep up with competitors. A good place to start is by subscribing to your competition’s email list so you can stay up to date on their promotions and messaging. For historical data, you can reference Google’s Ad Transparency Center to look at past ads, filtering by date ranges and ad types.
Source: Google Ads Transparency Center
As you review this data, consider:
- Are they running multiple sales throughout the year?
- Do their sales overlap with your promotional calendar?
- What kinds of creative and messaging are they putting into the market? Is it similar to yours?
- What kind of sitelink extensions are they using? Are they promoting one-day sales, product-specific deals, or added value propositions like free shipping?
You can then use these insights to make real-time adjustments. Don’t be afraid to switch up elements of your promotions to capitalize on new opportunities.
New year, new ads: refresh your messaging
Many brands run the same evergreen ad messaging for most of the year, only updating their copy for the holidays. But if you see stronger CTR performance with your winter or holiday messaging, you might want to refresh your messaging more often.
You should change up your ad copy every quarter (at the least!) to capture some of that supercharged effect throughout the year.
But that’s just the beginning; you can also take this opportunity to see how different variations of your copy perform with your audience. Periodically test new messaging during specific seasons or other promotional periods to determine what creative drives the best performance.
In addition to trying different creative angles and copy, consider experimenting with:
- Pinning headlines in your Responsive Search Ads
- Driving to different pages from your ads
- Testing campaign-level headlines and descriptions
Search success: optimize your search strategies
You’re probably already optimizing your search strategies during Q4, but why not make sure you’re taking advantage of top search tactics all year round?
For example, leveraging Max CPC Bid Limits within Portfolio Bid Strategies is a critical tactic for optimizing your campaigns toward a target Return on Ad Spend (tROAS), while maintaining control over cost per click (CPC). This is important to have in place during Q4 to avoid overpaying on discount, coupon, or sale-related keywords, but it can also help you control investment levels throughout the year for pricey keywords that drive traffic for the business.
Setting a bid limit creates a safety net that prevents your automated bidding strategy from overcommitting on individual clicks, especially in high-competition scenarios. This ensures that the campaigns remain cost-efficient, protecting your budget from runaway CPCs while still allowing the system to dynamically adjust bids to hit your tROAS target.
Within a portfolio, Max CPC Bid Limits allow for greater flexibility across multiple campaigns or ad groups. The portfolio approach can aggregate data and adjust bids intelligently, using insights from different campaigns to drive the best possible performance across your entire account.
You should also keep an eye on any high-index audiences Google flags that aren’t currently layered onto campaigns. This isn’t a “set it, and forget it” strategy: Google constantly flags new and different high-indexing in-market and affinity audiences. To maximize your efficiency, monitor those new audiences and continue to layer them onto your campaigns.
There are many ways to optimize your campaigns, but there is one key thing to keep in mind: consistently update your strategies. Don’t fall into the trap of letting your campaigns stay the same until Q4 rolls around.
Instead, work new tactics into your strategy throughout the year so you can start capitalizing on key opportunities well before Mariah Carey starts laying out her case for a particular gift on the radio.
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