Q4 is renowned for being the busiest quarter of the year in the world of eCommerce, and whilst the Global pandemic of Covid19 continues to wreak havoc throughout the world, I still expect Q4 to break YoY records.

Every year shoppers start to do their research and their browsing earlier and earlier, so if you haven’t started getting plans together, you really need to. There are several key dates you will want to note down in your calendar; Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday and of course, Christmas. These events are notorious for sales and make Q4 the highest-trafficked and most profitable time of the year for PPC accounts. In order to fully capitalise on Q4 and in particular these events it is imperative you give your PPC accounts a generous amount of TLC. Below I will outline some top tips to make the most out of your Q4 plans. 

The first step in your Q4 planning process should be analysing your previous performance and strategy. Use last year’s benchmarks for this upcoming period. Determining which days & weeks were most profitable, which keywords & ads had the highest CTR & conversion rates, and which products were best sellers will help you plan strategy & set budgets. Also, it is just as vital to evaluate what didn’t work. If you missed your performance goals, ran out of budget on your busiest days, or had less than compelling ad copy, make sure to address these issues with this year’s planning.

Keyword research is essential and is a large part of building a successful campaign. It is imperative you include some form of holiday-related keywords, such as “gift” or “present” in order to maximise your reach to potential customers. It is also important to use Google Trends data to keyword mine and combine this information with Google’s Keyword Planner to maximise your keyword inventory. On top of this, you need to be incorporating buzzwords such as “sale”, “offers” and other such variants. 

On top of this, your ad copy is vital to achieving a higher quality score and also a better CTR (Click Through Rate). Along with using buzzwords such as “sale” and “offers” in your keywords you need to incorporate text like “Black Friday Sale Now On” and utilise this with countdown ads to create awareness and urgency around your promotions. You can also use IF functions to message discounts and offers to your remarketing lists only and convert early-season window shoppers or email subscribers to purchasers. Alongside your ad copy, you need to ensure you are being clever and savvy with your ad extensions. Any promotions lasting less than one or two weeks should be highlighted in a promotion extension as well as ad copy, as a two-pronged attack.  Include sitelinks to pages showcasing your best sellers, gift sets, etc. Use callouts for shipping info (“Free Shipping,” “2 Day Shipping,” etc.). I cannot stress enough how important delivery times and costs are especially around the gift-giving season. According to the National Retail Federation, 89% of holiday shoppers intended to make in-store purchases in 2018. If you have physical retail locations, use location extensions to promote in-store visits or in-store pickups, especially in the week leading up to December 25 when express shipping becomes prohibitively expensive for most shoppers. But, make sure you account for this data somehow within Google Ads to really get the maximum out of your campaigns.

Every year Mobile Shopping increases and in Q4 2020 we are going to see it rise even more. According to Google, over 50% of mobile users abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. When you consider the majority of traffic coming through to site is most likely mobile, this is a fairly daunting statistic.  Furthermore, about 40% of online retail sales take place on mobile devices and that number increases a whopping 50% during Cyber Week, mobile load time can make or break the customer experience.  If your mobile site is currently slow to load, difficult to navigate, or difficult to checkout on, fix these issues now so you don’t miss out on a valuable revenue stream. This link is a great indicator of your site speed and also gives you loads of tips in how and what to improve.

I cannot stress enough, if you are not using Smart Bidding, you need to get this implemented now. Leveraging Smart Bidding can help your campaigns bring in more revenue or reach a higher ROAS by automatically adjusting your bids based on the likelihood a search will convert. If you are planning to utilise Smart Bidding on your search and shopping campaigns,  test and tweak them now so you have your best practices in place nicely and early. It takes on average two weeks for automated bid strategies to ramp, and another two to evaluate performance. It is important within this time to not adjust anything, you need to ride the waves of the storm to reap the benefits at the end, again another reason why you need to do this sooner rather than later. 

If you are already using Smart Bidding strategies, then you may want to adjust your targets to allow your campaigns to bid more aggressively. This helps accommodate spikes in traffic and conversion rate to capture additional revenue during major sales periods. You can even automate this process by adding a seasonality adjustment to your search or display campaigns that use automated bidding under the Advanced Controls section on the Bid Strategies page. Seasonality adjustments let your bid strategies know to expect a change in conversion rate during the sales period and bid accordingly, then immediately revert back to pre-sales behaviour. Please note this will not be needed during the Black Friday period as the signals Google uses will already know when this period is going to occur.