🎁🎄 Holiday Ad Spend Strategy

Hey everybody, this is Adam Arkfeld with ParaCore. Today is October 30th, and I wanna talk to you about bidding and budget strategies over the holiday season because the holiday season is a lot different than the rest of the year. And if you run products that have certain categories of consumers, like men, males or females, you have Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, then you kind of know what this is about.

You know that really targeting your advertising for those days is very important. And so, today, I’m just gonna go over an example of what we did for a client in the past around the holiday season. Because the holiday season, you have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then you have Christmas. So you have three really strong events depending on what you’re doing, if you have any sort of online sales that’s really important.

Okay, so this is an AdWords account that we run. And if you look at the cost graph here, it looks pretty uneventful. When you start to look a little bit closer, you can see that the strategy that we used is really specific. So the time range here is November 1st to December 31st. And you can see here that on November 1st, we’re spending a hundred dollars a day. It’s basically a flat line for the first 10 days or so, I guess until the 8th. And then around that time, we started to increase the budget. So the budget increased. We started spending closer to $500 a day, maybe around 400, just depending on the day. And then, that was the budget and the spend somewhere between three and four and $500 for the next, basically, 10 or 15 days.

And then, right at Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we increased the spend to 860. Well, here’s Black Friday. They’re really a Cyber Monday deal. They’re an online retailer. But 560, 860, 940, and then 1,000. So, the ads spent throughout the month of November was approximately around in the neighborhood of like four or $5,000. And you can see that for the first seven days, we were only spending 700. Then we increased it to three to $400 per day for the lead-up. And then come Black Friday and Cyber Monday, we went really hard, and then we brought it back down to $100 a day for the end of the month.

Okay, so what we did was we basically went really slow, and you can even turn off your ads for first, I would say, maybe 10 days of the month. Then we increased it a little bit because we thought people might start purchasing before. And then we put most of our money during the weekend from Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, right? So most of our ads spent is in those four days. So you can see it’s a couple thousand dollars there. And then we took a very similar strategy around Christmas. However, Christmas has a longer lead-time and a longer buying cycle before the holiday itself. People wanna buy something, get it delivered, and then be able to open it on or around Christmastime.

So, here is November 30th. You can see again that we have a certain amount of ads spent, $400 or so, right around 450, somewhere in that neighborhood, up to 600. And then, Christmas, is right, so we had Friday, December 22nd, the 23rd, and then you have Christmas which was on Monday last year. So what we did was we actually used about a week window, about three or four days out from Christmas to allow time for shipping. Because this is a product that someone buys online. It gets shipped out. We want them to be able to open it. So, by the 21st, we had really scaled back the ads, And the days before, we were in the neighborhood of 15, $1600 a day.

So you can see that we ramped up the spend, ran it for about a week, spent probably seven or $8,000, and then dramatically decreased it around the 21st, 22nd. And then it went very slow through the holiday season and in the week after Christmas. Now, that’s a very particular instance because this product needs to be shipped. And it needs to be sent. But, I wanna illustrate the point that within AdWords, if you have an online business, and you have a lot of activity around the holidays, it’s very easy and doable to be scheduling your ads and your budget and just taking the exact same budget you have. But instead of doing it throughout the month evenly, which tends to be the default, and I think people just do that because it seems to make more sense, really think about when the money should be spent, where you’re gonna get the highest return, and when you should be running your budget. You could run your entire holiday budget over three days around Cyber Monday if you wanted. If Cyber Monday was your biggest holiday, and you knew you were gonna get a lot of activity, run $10,000 over three days and just for the rest of the holiday season, turn it off. Or run $10,000 over three days and then depending on how you do you can then decide how you wanna handle Christmas. And you can really ramp it up then or just turn it off. So you don’t need to run it evenly, and we actually highly recommend around the holiday season, because of the timing and the variability of when people are buying, to really schedule and allocate your funds at certain points in time so that you get the highest return and the highest bang for your buck. So, that’s just a little bit of strategy that we use here at ParaCore when we’re running campaigns for the holiday season.

So if you have any questions, please let me know. My name’s Adam; I own ParaCore. Please comment below. Like the video, subscribe to it if you enjoyed it. If you need help doing this type of thing for your business, reach out. My emails in the description. It’s adam@paracore, and I would love to speak with you. Thanks a lot, and I’ll see you in the next video.

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