5 Tips for Paid Media Success

Are You Ready For Holiday Shopping?

Though the holiday shopping season is almost here (and for some has already started), there’s still time to update your paid media strategies to ensure holiday shopping success.

Online shopping continues to break sales records each year despite (or because of) pandemics, rising costs, shipping delays and more – but with planning and optimizing, you can be ready for the upcoming shopping season.

“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes”

Start by analyzing your campaign performance from the previous year. What worked well and what didn’t? You should look at top-performing products, keywords and ad copy along with current trends within your market. Google Search Trends and Pinterest Trends are good starting points. Also, think of an add-on incentive (such as free shipping, “secret” discount codes or half-off additional items) to close the sale.

It’s expected that 70% of online retailers will provide free shipping this holiday season. We strongly recommend differentiating your brand from your competitors and this is just one way to do so.

 Remarketing+

If you’re not currently remarketing to your website visitors, you’re possibly missing out on a huge opportunity to close a sale or lead.

Consumers now expect holiday sales and anticipate making their purchases at this time, but they’re doing their research now.

Segment website visitors into specific audiences now and develop and serve creative images that will resonate with each of these segments to get the most out of it. In your campaigns, when the time is right for you, add these previous website visitors as a targeted audience as well as the classic shopping cart abandoner.

However, paid channel audiences have minimum list sizes and sometimes your list will not be large enough to target. This is when it becomes Remarketing+.

That means using your list as the seed audience to create a lookalike/similar audience. In this way, you can target your previous visitors as well as find people very similar to them.

Paid Search and Shopping at The Top

Mobile search and shopping are now the first touchpoints for most shopping experiences. According to Insider, CPC prices are up 14% YoY, and CPMs have increased 75%.  Unfortunately, the YoY increases have impacted all publishers, so expect to pay more everywhere you advertise. Despite these increases, search and shopping strategies are a must during the holiday season if you want to compete at the top of the SERP.

To help conserve budget, you should be more aggressive when you have better discounts and use remarketing and video to support during traditional pricing.  

 The Shopping Feed Rules Everything Around Me

How is your shopping feed?

Are your product titles at the start of the description?

Are you using alternate image attributes?

Are the prices updated automatically?

It’s believed that Google maintains a hidden Shopping Quality score, which controls how, when and where your products show up. And the way to affect your Shopping Quality score is to have a pristine and accurate shopping feed in Google Merchant Center (GMC). It will also behoove you to check GMC to ensure all components are optimized, such as reviews and shipping times.

 Look Beyond the Hegemony

Though by and large, most people begin their holiday shopping search on Google, that’s not the only place. Gift ideas come from Instagram and Pinterest. TikTok and YouTube are for searching and finding shopping ideas, as well. DuckDuckGo is favored by some, and its Shopping platform is powered by Microsoft Ads, which can be synced with Google. Consumers ask others for ideas on Reddit and Quora.

The 2022 holiday shopping season will, once again, be unprecedented in many ways, but with these tips, we’re confident you’ll have a successful sales season for your business.