Q4 Holiday Planning: It Never Ends, And Why You Should Think About it Early
While it might seem early to be thinking about the holidays in the middle of summer, now is the time to begin your advertising plan for the upcoming holiday season. Black Friday and the 2024 holiday season are fast approaching and you don’t want to be caught off guard with any part of your media plan.
After years of working in eCommerce advertising, I’ve navigated numerous holiday strategies, campaign planning, and overall market shifts. Here’s a guide to help you avoid last-minute campaign creation or abrupt changes to your overall holiday strategy.
Getting Your Campaigns Together
It might sound a bit ridiculous, but planning for the biggest week of the year should start much earlier than you might think. While reviewing past performance is essential, consumer behavior has evolved, and Black Friday is no longer just one day so, planning for all of November and December is more crucial than ever. Here are five key steps you can take as a PPC professional to help get your eCommerce account buzzing for the holiday season.
Granular Recommendations for PPC Performance
1. Checklists and Key Dates
- Planning, planning, and planning: this is the cornerstone to having a successful holiday period for any paid advertising campaigns. Every year, we put together a Black Friday game plan that lists budgets for Q4, including all the last-minute details we’ll need to incorporate and checklists for each campaign type, strategy and focus. This ensures we’re prepared for the quarter.
- We KNOW there will be last minute changes to promotions, product availability, pricing, landing pages…pretty much everything can change. But being prepared with 40%, or 90% of the campaign build will make it that much easier to pivot quickly if needed.
- Get as granular as possible with budgeting by putting together monthly, weekly, daily, and “special” budget pacing plans. Gantt charts are our favorite way to do this, and you can have a Gantt budget plan at every level of granularity.
- Monthly can be a blanket evergreen budget, but also include budgets and sales projections by brand or category.
- Weekly should increase coverage as demand and sales goals increase.
- Daily can cover historic BIG sales days and account for influx in demand as the day goes on, think hourly promotions or timing your search budget in lockstep with TV, CTV or other media announcements.
- Special budgets – if you have vendors offering co-op dollars you should plan for that. If you have a “stretch goal” bonus budget set aside if you hit your goals – you should be ready for that as well. We’ve heard too many times in the past to not be prepared for the; “Our CMO is happy with the results, can we spend $50k more by Friday?”.
2. Budgeting November and December With Consumer and Market Changes
- In the past, planning for Black Friday was straightforward: set your estimated budget for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and spend fairly equally each day for the rest of the month. However, the pandemic shifted consumer behavior, leading to purchases throughout November and December, predominantly online.
- To adapt, forecast your budget for each day and gradually increase it as you get closer to the big sales days for your company. This helps you avoid exceeding your allocated budget and allows you to allocate resources effectively for key dates like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Week.
- Remember the reason for the season…of increased budgets. The general reason why we’re focused on spending more is because oftentimes the Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion perform much better than other times of the year. So it’s crucial to capture the demand as users convert at a higher rate and a cheaper CPA than other times of the year.
3. Monitor Your Budget Daily
- Major advertisers like Target and Amazon dominate the shopping ads space with multi-million dollar budgets. Keeping an eye on your budgets at a daily level will ensure you can maximize your strategy for the entire month. As we said, Black Friday isn’t one day anymore.
- Daily influxes in demand throughout November and December can often deplete your daily budget. This is a key reason to review your campaigns throughout the day to see hour-by-hour demand and budget pacing. If you’re on top of your spend you can be in greater control of your sales growth and overall success.
4. Launch New Campaigns Before Q3
- Avoid building campaigns last minute, as new Shopping or Performance Max campaigns require up to a 14-day learning period. Focusing on the previous year performance when it comes to top brands or product types for your website is key! Launch these campaigns in Q3. This way, you’ll only need to adjust your Target ROAS or bid strategy to accommodate increased traffic on the busiest days.
5. Automated Rules Are Your Friends
- Even the most organized PPC specialists can struggle to manage every campaign for a large account. Automated rules can help with more than just budgets, such as auto-adjusting budgets throughout the day or reducing spend at 11 PM. Use automated rules for specific promotions, like Black Friday ads, to ensure everything is set up in advance, allowing you to focus on performance optimization on the actual day.
Plan Ahead for a Stellar Holiday Season
Being aware of your holiday strategy well before it starts is important. Merchandisers might already be planning their sales for next year, so why shouldn’t marketers be planning for it as well? Use these tips and you’ll have a stellar holiday season.
Looking for help with your holiday planning?
If you need help with your holiday strategy, digital marketing development, management, and implementation, or anything PPC-related, please don’t hesitate to use the button below to get in touch!