Optimising Display Advertising campaigns for Christmas?

If you haven’t already started looking at your client’s display advertising campaigns for Christmas, now is the time to start planning.

It’s scary to think that it’s less than 124 sleeps until Christmas and less than under four months away from starting the festive season

Under four months may seem like a lifetime away, but if you don’t start looking at your campaigns until the last minute, you will certainly find your competitors stealing all your potential business. Have you heard of the saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail?”

For most retailers, Christmas is the busiest time of year, with a news article published in the Guardian revealing that “Sales on Christmas Day 2015, were up 21% from the previous year, 2014, making it the most lucrative ever for online shopping, according to data from a web services group PCA Predict.”

The article also revealed that retailing giants John Lewis were also a big winner in online advertising. The retailing giants reported a 10.7% increase in revenues on 25 December 2015 compared with the previous year.

The spree happened between 2 pm and 4 pm, as people sat down for Christmas lunch looking for an early Boxing day bargain.

Here are five ways how to optimise a display advertising campaign for Christmas:

Remarketing

Why not use Dynamic Remarketing through the Google display network?

If you have previously attracted customers with certain keywords earlier in the year or last Christmas that worked, target them again with the products your customers have been viewing. Keywords that include terms such as “iPhone”, “iPad”, or “bikes” are items that always sell well during the festive season.

Optimising your Display ad campaign for mobile

An article on eCommerce news said that smartphones and tablets accounted for over half of online sales in the United Kingdom for the first time. From November 2015 to January this year, 51 per cent of UK online retail sales took place using smartphones and tablets, and this is a significant increase in the 45 per cent share recorded in the third quarter of last year.

With this in mind, it would be unthinkable to ignore optimising your display ad campaign for mobile by concentrating on desktop only.

Think about suitable placements?

Stop and think about where you would like to place your ads before repeating what has worked on previous campaigns.

If you are using strong ad placements, remove them and make sure you’re using managed placements to choose the sites you are targeting and design your ads so that they complement the look and feel of the site you wish to target. There’s no point in placing your display ads on a site that is irrelevant to your customers or placing an ad on a website that looks out of place and doesn’t fit their theme. Always do your homework before optimising a display ad campaign.

Split test your display advertising ads

Have you considered splitting your display advertising ads the same way as text ads? Try out different (CTAs), new offers, promotions, images and colour schemes.  Make sure that your ad rotation settings are set correctly so that you can collect equal data for A and B split testing.

Test the Display advertising campaign optimiser tool

If you are looking to put a quick display advertising campaign together, why not check out the Display Campaign Optimer tool from Google. You will need at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days, and you will still need to optimise them manually by doing regular target and placement reviews.

What optimisation techniques do you use on Display Campaigns for your clients? Have you started thinking about or working on your client’s Christmas campaigns yet? It would be great to hear from anyone.