The 12 Tips of Christmas
for search and social marketing to make your season
Merry + Bright
Click the presents below to unwrap each of the 12 best practices, or to download your own copy, click here.
Analyze historical seasonal data to understand past performance and adjust current program to produce more optimal results. Don’t be afraid to increase bids and open up budgets to account for heavy competition on key dates.
Skai Pro Tip:
Guide your sleigh with Skai Halogen Inform™ to account for the impact of your promotional schedule and any offline media buys on campaign budgets and pacing.
Use forecasting tools to gain insights into future performance, particularly on key dates such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, to understand potential return at various spending levels.
Skai Pro Tip:
Turn on the lights with Skai Halogen Foresee™ to forecast search spending throughout the season and develop scenario plans that you can immediately activate through Skai Portfolio Optimizer™ (KPO) bidding.
Expand keywords to include seasonal-specific terms. Be sure to implement a negative strategy to ensure your budget isn’t going towards unwanted, unqualified search queries.
Skai Pro Tip:
Review the Keyword Suggest Report to expand keyword coverage and concatenate top terms to trim the tree with holiday-inspired phrases. Then, leverage the Cannibalization Report to eliminate duplicates, minimize competing keywords, and avoid overspending.
Develop relevant, holiday-specific ad copy with clear calls to action. Implement testing to ensure your most effective messaging is used on peak times during the festive season to drive the most engagement.
Skai Pro Tip:
Automate ad copy analysis with the Skai A/B Testing Report to quickly determine “winners” and “losers.” Act on results through automated flighting via Scheduled Actions so you can spend time celebrating, not optimizing. Promotions over? Reverse your Scheduled Actions to revert to previous status.
Utilize Google Shopping campaigns and promote Product Listing Ads (PLAs) with high impact images to draw in shoppers who are ready to purchase.
Skai Pro Tip:
Leverage KPO to maximize your Shopping campaigns with intelligent automation. Then, repurpose assets from your top performing products in PLA to add some jingle to your social marketing by automatically turning them into Facebook ads with Skai Demand-Driven Campaigns™.
Ensure consumers have an optimal shopping experience across devices and applications with tailored copy and landing pages that allow for a simple, seamless conversion process.
Skai Pro Tip:
Tis the season to have an app: drive shoppers to download, install, and re-engage with Search & Social app ads. Don’t forget to use the Skai Mobile SDK to track in-app conversions and optimize to Lifetime Value.
Explore local search features so consumers can find brick-and-mortar stores nearby to make purchases and integrate this offline activity to get a full customer picture.
Skai Pro Tip:
Steer traffic to physical locations by updating your place pages via Skai Local and take action to optimize using online-to-offline data via integrations with partners such as LiveRamp and Revtrax.
Retarget shoppers who have engaged with you in the past to help close the sale or promote complementary products.
Skai Pro Tip:
Keep the Yule log burning as you re-engage customers that have visited your site through Facebook Exchange (FBX) or Google RLSA campaigns. Make your remarketing more powerful by showcasing three products in a single ad unit on Facebook via Multi-product ads.
Channel consumer passion by integrating social sharing options, such as the Pinterest “Pin It” button, into your product pages to drive engagement and sales.
Skai Pro Tip:
Review Skai Search & Social Analytics to understand which products are performing well on Pinterest but not Google Shopping (and vice versa) and update ads accordingly.
Leverage insights from search campaigns to inform your social ad programs and reach your highest-value audiences most likely to convert.
Skai Pro Tip:
Implement Skai Intent-Driven Audiences™ to automatically create and update Facebook Custom Audiences based on the intent consumers demonstrate through interaction with your search engine ads. Then, share the gift of these high-performing segments by expanding with Facebook Lookalikes to reach and acquire net new customers.
Optimize your campaigns more frequently during the festive season to continually improve performance.
Skai Pro Tip:
Make your list and check it twice: analyze device, ad copy, and keyword day-over-day performance via Skai reporting and quickly make optimizations based on results using Advanced Search.
Give credit where credit is due through an integrated, multi-touch attribution model.
Skai Pro Tip:
Tie your attribution to your bidding with Skai to optimize with real-time insights and achieve a complete package of seasonal success.