How To Effectively Manage Your Holiday Advertising Budget

It doesn’t matter how many Ads you run during the holiday season, it’s just the CONVERSIONS that matters in the end.

From an Amazon sellers’ outlook, this season is about high impressions and conversions that are to be grabbed for a Successful Holiday Marketing Campaign.

To achieve that, it’s time to talk Q4.

Americans spend billions of dollars on Amazon during the holiday season for buying gifts, decorations, and food. Of course, you can’t grab billions in a single campaign, but a million would still sound real.

A well-planned Holiday Sales Strategy is all about allocating the right amount of budget in the right way. The 2 rights in the prior sentence count a lot since understanding where your marketing dollars are going is more than important.

In Amazon, there is a fine line between a fool and an expert; a fool learns from his own advertisement mistakes, while an expert learns from the mistakes of others and use the past patterns to make future decisions.

People don’t read ads, they read what interests them. To check their interest, it is extremely important to look at the past trends of the holiday season in order to create a successful Amazon strategy for the holiday season.

LAST YEAR HOLIDAY TRENDS

Past patterns are substantial for making decisions. You should have an idea about the timeline you should run Ads and the products that can bring you good results on Amazon.

Conversion Rates mainly increase during the first 2 weeks of December, with a little decline after that. So if you haven’t set up your marketing campaign yet, now is your ideal opportunity.

If you sell in the category of Toys and Games, the margins are very high since sales and conversions are likely to go up in December. Well, it does decline after the 3^rd week.

The clothing and beauty industry normally booms in the month of October especially during the Halloween fashion craze, and it does show an uptick during the last week of December. If you sell stuff related to winter clothes and jackets, then this season is best for your marketing campaigns.

With black Friday and Christmas joining the shopping industry, home and kitchen items go on a peak in November till the month of January. If you sell in this category, you still have much time to design your PPC Campaigns.

These trends will tell you much about the productive timelines, but your own historical data is still the first thing you should see when designing your holiday sales strategy.

Moving swiftly onto the next step:

How to make the most of your Holiday Advertising Budget?

The first step is to make sure about the basic fundamentals.

From your inventory to other systems and processes, make sure that you have everything ready before you begin spending your hard-earned dollars.

Ask yourself this question; are your listings retail ready?

If they aren’t, get it optimized in the first place.

Hiring an agency for your Amazon PPC advertising makes sense as long as your product pages are primed (Amazon retail ready), otherwise, you won’t get the hits and sales despite the traffic on your listings. That traffic will not earn you anything except a bunch of impressions for nothing.

The most essential components of ‘retail ready’ are your reviews, product description, bullet points, and off course your product images. You need to get all of these optimized before even setting up a budget.

• Shift your focus from Product Ads to the Brand Ads

This may not sound convincing but sponsored brand ads work greatly in the ending months of the year. You should definitely shift a reasonable budget for these ads since this feature is more efficient in converting leads on certain times of the year.

The best thing about the Amazon Sponsored Ad is that it automatically displays the most relevant ASINs to your store based on the customers’ searches. Which in turn increasing your chances of getting swift sales.

• Use the Dynamic Ad Feature to retarget your Black Friday shoppers

As I mentioned earlier, retargeting your old shoppers is definitely a great way to earn quick conversions.

• Create your Priorities

You should decide the product that makes sense to advertise, provided that it should have decent reviews followed by good images and maybe a smooth sales history, which can earn you a reasonable CTR & CR.

Both Amazon search and display Ads are ideal in this case since they direct customers to the product page as soon as it gets a click.

• Run Keyword Focused Campaigns

The best holiday sales strategy would be to target customers via their searches since they add up the relevancy factor in your advertising campaigns.

However, you surely won’t like to show up your Ad to the irrelevant audience who are most likely not to make a purchase and thereby causing your Ad spend to spike. The best approach in this campaign is to be as precise as possible especially during the Holiday Advertising on Amazon because you should look to show your Ad to that audience with a 70% to 80% chance of buying your product.

Showing your Ad to a limited audience is indeed better than showing it to the larger and less relevant audience.

• Don’t miss out on the display Ads

It can be a great alternative to the search ads, but running both of them simultaneously does make sense to a certain extent.

In simpler terms, Display Ads target people who looked at your product but didn’t make a purchase. The ad retargets them on external sites and mobile devices which makes it an extremely invaluable tool for earning good conversions.

The customer will receive a notification like “You still interested in buying that headphone you were searching last week?”

What else can be a better way to retarget customers based on their clicks?

It cannot be totally wrong to say that display ad is great for gaining impressions while search ads for the clicks, but they combined can convert a great number of high intent shoppers.

• Jump on the Holiday Lightning deals

You need to be a prime seller with a 3+ rating to participate in the lightning deal along with a high volume SKUs. Otherwise, it is wiser to stick to the search and display ads.

When designing an amazon strategy for the holiday season, you surely can’t keep the lightening deals out the game. You have already planned to run deal ads, it’s time to make a proper strategy.

This area would precisely work on the experiments. There is no fixed target in this particular area of advertisement. You can run ads based on targeting competitors or maybe interest-based targeting; if they don’t work, targeting complementary ASINs and your categories are still a few of the choices you can split test.

Over to you

The holiday season is about to over. To be frank, you really don’t have enough time to look at each and every aspect of Q4. But, if you can just focus on these 6 points, I am sure you can come out with an effective holiday sales strategy. Make sure your listings are equipped with engaging content and A+, your inventory is stocked, Images are up to the mark, and reviews are managed before you start spending your hard-earned dollars to your Amazon PPC Campaigns.

Good Luck With Your Holiday Advertising Budget!

In case you don’t plan to outsource your Amazon PPC Campaigns, you need to read this guide to achieve the best out of Amazon searches: Amazon Listing Optimization Guide 2022