7-step guide to seasonal PPC campaign planning for eCommerce

Why are seasonal PPC campaigns so important for eCommerce?

Seasonality affects every retailer differently and it plays a role throughout the year. We can start by recognising the repeatable, annual events that impact demand and sales:

1. Seasonal holidays: Christmas, New Year, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc. – plus bank holidays.
2. Seasonal sales: Boxing Day Sales, January Sales, Summer Sales, Black Friday, etc.
3. School breaks: Half terms, summer breaks and bank holiday weekends.
4. The retail seasons: Spring, summer, autumn and winter all impact consumer spending in different ways – largely driven by weather patterns, but also social conventions (eg: summer holidays, winter diets, etc.).
5. Annual events: Major sporting events (champions League Final, Wimbledon, etc.), major festivals, Pride Month, etc.

Repeatable events help us identify trends throughout the year, but demand can vary from one year to the next. A complex variety of unpredictable factors can also impact seasonality, including:

• Weather patterns
• The economic climate
• The political landscape
• News coverage
• Inbound tourism
• Demand shocks

Weather has a significant impact on consumer spending throughout the year – even from one day to the next. Obviously, the economic landscape plays a key role, although UK consumers have shown a lot of resilience over the past few years.

Demand shocks are completely unpredictable, causing sudden increases or decreases in demand for certain products, product categories or brands. For example, one specific camera suddenly trends on TikTok and now the manufacturer can’t keep up with demand.

What to consider when planning your seasonal PPC campaign

Effective seasonal PPC campaigns require a lot of planning with plenty of analysis and optimisation. For now, let’s concentrate on seven of the most important steps you need to implement:

1. Review historical campaign performance
2. Identify seasonal keywords
3. Define your target audiences
4. Set your seasonal budgets
5. Optimise your landing pages
6. Maximise performance with bid optimisation
7. Test, experiment & refine

Each step is an ongoing process that refines campaign performance and generates more insights for you to test and optimise further.

1. Review historical PPC performance

The first task with seasonal PPC campaign planning is to analyse historical performance. Here are some of the most important metrics to analyse:

• Keyword search volumes (demand)
• Impression share
• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Sales volumes
• Avg. purchase value

Break down performance by product groups and specific products, analysing demand and sales volumes. Also, consider that your standard campaign optimisations may need tweaking for seasonal campaigns – for example, you might want to revise ad scheduling.

Predictability is the key to seasonal campaign planning, but how can you predict the unpredictable? Well, you can start by analysing performance data to identify the following eCommerce seasonal trends:

1. Seasonal baseline performance: Use campaign data from the past 3-5+ years to map a mean average of seasonal performance across each quarter.
2. Repeatable fluctuations: The consistent, relatively predictable spikes and drops associated with specific periods of the year – eg: Christmas, bank holiday weekends, etc.
3. Uncontrolled variables: Factors like weather patterns, economic trends and other uncontrolled variables that impact seasonal performance.

Seasonal baselines help you set realistic targets and identify long-term trends. For example, you might find interest in Black Friday is gradually declining over time.

Repeatable fluctuations identify seasonal spikes in interest, demand and sales. Aside from telling you when to run seasonal campaigns, they also reveal key consumer trends – like which products sell the most.

Finally, the uncontrolled variables help you identify factors that could impact campaign performance ahead of time. For example, if we’re having a particularly wet summer and you understand how rainfall impacts product sales, you can incorporate these insights into your seasonal campaigns.

2. Identify seasonal keywords

A seasonal keyword is any query that sees demand increase at specific periods of the year. Some of these queries include seasonal phrases (eg: Mother’s Day card) but most simply experience high search volumes – like “turkey” at Christmas or “pumpkin” around Halloween.

As an online retailer, you want to analyse search volumes for target keywords in the same way as campaign performance. Identify the repeatable spikes, emerging trends and year-to-year changes in search volumes. This is the strongest indicator you have for demand levels for products, services and selling points – eg: free delivery vs in-store pickup.

Also, pay close attention to long-tail queries in your seasonal keyword targeting strategy. You’ll often find the time-sensitive nature of these consumer periods reveals more specific interests – eg: “best Black Friday deals 2024” or “best deals Samsung 4K TV January sales”.

3. Define your target audiences

Seasonal demand spikes often mean a wider audience of people are searching for your products. For example, customers might typically buy your products for themselves during most of the year, but Christmas brings an audience of buyers seeking gifts for others.

Not only is this a different target audience, but a completely different consumer journey. So, at the broadest level, you might identify two key audiences:

1. Recipients – encouraging them to drop hints to their loved ones.
2. Buyers – positioning phones as the perfect gift for someone special.

Within each category, you might specify parents buying gifts for their kids, partners for their loved ones, close friends, etc. Now, with targeting options on a platform like Meta, you can pinpoint specific audiences within these two groups:

• Demographics: Target users based on their age, gender, location and language.
• Devices: Show ads to people based on the device they use – eg: iPhone upgrades or trade-ins for potential recipients to existing iPhone users.
• Interests: Target users who show an interest in phones, consumer tech and other relevant topics.
• Custom audiences: Reach audiences who have interacted with your account, ads and content.
• Retargeting: Show ads to website visitors and existing customers.
• Lookalike: Reach a wider audience of people showing similar interests/behaviours to those already engaging and buying from you.

You can layer targeting settings to create hyper-relevant ad groups for specific audiences.

For example, you can combine age targeting with device and interests to reach older kids who might want a phone upgrade. Meanwhile, you can create another ad group with age targeting to reach potential parents.

4. Set your seasonal budgets

Seasonal campaigns are designed to capitalise on increased demand during key periods of the year. You expect higher sales volumes during these defined periods, so you want to dedicate more of your annual PPC budget to these periods and the campaigns you’re running. Higher budgets allow you to get your ads seen by relevant audiences more often – at a time when purchase intent is at its highest.

5. Maximise performance with bid optimisation

Aside from increasing your PPC budget for seasonal campaigns, you’ll also want to rethink bid strategies and optimisation. Pay special attention to how the consumer journey and purchase intent change during seasonal periods.

For example, during the Christmas period, purchase intent increases dramatically as the big day approaches. You may also find similar patterns during fashion seasons when time is running out to get the best fits for the next few months.

Early on in campaigns, you might prioritise visibility and brand awareness to reach the widest possible audience. However, as the campaign progresses, you might increasingly prioritise conversions with your bid strategies.

Read our guide on optimising eCommerce PPC bid strategies for more info.

6. Optimise your landing pages

Getting users to click through to your website is great, but you’re merely paying for traffic unless your landing pages convert visitors into paying customers.

Here are some key tips for optimising your seasonal PPC landing pages:

• Create relevant landing pages for every ad
• Lean into the seasonal spirit
• Test landing page copy variations to find the perfect tone
• Maximise conversion rates with CRO
• Minimise bounce rates (with no conversion)
• Reduce loading times
• Optimise Core Web Vitals
• Test hero section (above the fold) variations
• Test CTA variations
• Test CTA placement and track impressions, scroll depth, etc.
• Simplify layouts
• Emphasise key elements with contrast, colours and whitespace
• Minimise decision fatigue (relevance and simplicity)
• Remove the navigation menu
• Reduce web form, checkout and payment friction
• Leverage urgency for Christmas and other time-sensitive seasonal campaigns
• Revise your language pages and offers as the season progresses (and intent changes)

You may need to adapt landing page messaging and seasonal promotions in PPC campaigns at different stages. For example, you might switch the tone from gift ideas to last-minute deals during the final week before Christmas – while emphasising guaranteed delivery by Xmas Eve.

7. Test, experiment & refine

Every seasonal campaign is a chance to test, experiment and refine results – for future campaigns, as much as your current ones. No two seasons are ever quite the same, so constantly review campaign performance to learn more about the variables impacting sales. At the same time, test campaigns and assets to maximise short-term results:

• Campaign settings – eg: two identical campaigns with different bid strategies
• Ad groups – eg: different targeting settings
• Ad formats, ad placements, etc.
• Ad copy variations
• Promotions, key selling points, etc. – eg: discounts vs free delivery
• Landing pages
• Product images, descriptions, etc.
• Channels – eg: Google Shopping vs Amazon Ads

Pull in as many third-party insights as you can to understand the context of campaign performance. This is particularly important for the uncontrolled variables we talked about earlier, such as weather patterns and economic trends.

For example, if you analyse weather data vs product sales, you might find correlations between events like rainfall and sales volumes for specific products. Once you uncover this insight, you could pull data from Met Office weather predictions and increase bids on relevant ad groups when rainfall is expected. Better yet, you can fully automate this process so bids are pre-optimised and ready to take full advantage. As a result, you’ve turned an uncontrolled variable from a potential threat into a valuable opportunity.

Need help planning seasonal eCommerce PPC campaigns?

If your seasonal campaigns aren’t maximising sales during peak periods, our PPC team can help. Call us on 023 9283 0281 or send us your details below to get the most out of channels like Google Shopping and Amazon. You can also learn more about our PPC services here.