Paid Search Holiday Season Tips for Marketers – Download the Full List

Paid search holiday tips are now available from Skai as a downloadable PDF. Q4 is the biggest quarter for search engine advertising spend because it’s the biggest shopping period of the year. Make sure that you are ready for these important next few months with some final best practices for search advertising and some tips for using Skai to drive performance and save valuable time. Good luck with your Q4 campaigns!

Download your complimentary checklist today.

Last year’s Q4 was the biggest ever for paid search advertisers. Not only was overall 2018 search marketing spend up a healthy 9% over 2017’s holiday shopping season, but advertisers were able to squeeze 49% more impressions from the same spend by dropping the average cost-per-click (CPC) 18% from $0.40 to $0.33. That kind of operational efficiency is exactly what marketers hope to find as high budgets and cheaper clicks equal a lot more eyeballs and traffic to their online stores.

Are you confident in your holiday season paid search plan this year? Before it fully kicks off, review Skai’s search advertising tips for the holiday season to see if you can find any last-minute tricks to garner even more ROI.

Download the 2019 Paid Search Holiday Season Tips Checklist
Available now, this Skai Search checklist is chock full of advice, best practices, and tips for search advertisers to take advantage of this critical time of the year.

Here are the first 5 Search Advertising tips from the Skai Search holiday season checklist:

Paid Search Holiday Season Tip #1 – Manage budgets wisely

To take full advantage of the increased conversion activity during the holiday shopping season, it’s uber important to make sure that your budgets are set correctly. Use Skai’s Budget Navigator to easily manage daily budgets across portfolios which could be comprised of many campaigns. For some of the heaviest shopping days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, use the boost feature to drive more spend when needed.

Paid Search Holiday Season Tip #2 – Get notified when external data is missing

Many brands connect the dots between their paid search programs and their internal, back-end tracking systems. Skai Search can ingest these files and match them to paid search campaign data so that the platform’s optimization functionality can truly drive holistic performance. If you are using external files, you might want to set a Skai alert to notify you when the revenue is blank so that you can fix any issues.

Paid Search Holiday Season Tip #3 – Be smart and use Smart Tags

Skai Smart Tags are automated labels that proactively provide you with actionable insights into campaign performance and optimization. These can be extremely helpful by alerting you to common issues that can hinder performance— something you definitely don’t want to happen during the holiday season. For example, there’s a Smart Tag that will automatically identify keywords which are blocked by negative keywords.

Paid Search Holiday Season Tip #4 – Get a second set of eyes watching your accounts

There are so many different settings within paid search, and if one of them accidentally gets changed, it could have disastrous consequences. With Skai Audit, you can define various settings that the system will doublecheck are still set every day and alert you if something goes astray. For example, you can set Skai Audit to make sure a set of campaigns are targeted to the desired geolocation or device type.

Paid Search Holiday Season Tip #5 – Gain more control over your optimizations

While Skai Portfolio Optimizer (KPO) is a powerful way to automatically drive performance within your paid search accounts, sometimes you want to manually override the settings to enable a specific tactic. You can use portfolio subsets to tag certain keywords—or groups of keywords—so that you can direct the system in the way you want it to behave. This can be a useful way to drive more conversions during a sale or specific product promotion for a short time without having to take them out of the portfolio.

Get the full checklist of search advertising holiday tips today!

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