The holiday season is a prime opportunity to elevate your marketing game, and with Google’s Performance Max campaigns, you can harness the full power of Google’s advertising ecosystem to reach the right audiences. Whether you’re in ecommerce or a service-based industry, a well-executed holiday marketing strategy can make a substantial impact.
Throughout this guide, I’ve included detailed explainers for each strategy, demonstrating how you can maximize your campaign’s effectiveness. From holiday-themed visuals to strategic promotions, these 10 tips will help you drive holiday sales and make the most of the festive season.
Contents
- Target holiday-specific search themes
- Capture the spirit of the season with festive visuals
- Highlight special offers with promotions
- Personalize retargeting with Google’s customer match
- Test different asset groups for varied audiences
- Highlight local inventory and services
- Create urgency with time-sensitive messaging
- Create engaging holiday video ads with Performance Max
- Optimize high-value conversions with value-based bidding
- Monitor asset group performance for real-time optimization
10 Google Ads Performance Max tips for holiday sales
Here are our top Performance Max strategies for the holiday season.
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1. Target holiday-specific search themes
Focus on capturing holiday-related search intent by identifying Performance Max search themes that spike during the festive season. Use Performance Max’s insights to discover trending themes like “best holiday gifts,” “seasonal offers,” or industry-specific phrases.
For businesses that provide services rather than products, try incorporating themes such as “holiday booking,” “year-end consultation,” or “seasonal discounts.” In your new seasonal asset group, be sure to adjust the visuals, headlines, descriptions, and videos, as well as the search themes. That way, you can precisely target holiday-focused customers and capitalize on seasonal interest.
2. Capture the spirit of the season with festive visuals
Create a holiday atmosphere in your campaigns by using festive images, seasonal color palettes, and engaging video content that captures the spirit of the season. Holiday-themed visuals grab attention and evoke emotions that can drive conversions, making them essential for your holiday marketing strategy. This applies to industries beyond ecommerce as well, such as showcasing winter-themed projects, highlighting special holiday events, or featuring limited-time offers that are visually compelling.
It’s crucial to update your ad visuals and fine-tune your asset group’s targeting to focus on holiday-specific interests. Consider modifying the listing group within your holiday-themed asset group to include only the products or services you want to emphasize during the holiday season. This approach ensures that you’re showcasing the most relevant offerings that align with seasonal demand, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
3. Highlight special offers with promotion assets
The holiday season is all about deals. Emphasize your special offers—such as percentage discounts, free shipping, or limited-time services—across multiple ad formats in Performance Max. Promotions can significantly enhance ad visibility and attract clicks, making them essential to any holiday strategy. For service-based businesses, highlight discounted services, free consultations, or holiday bundles that make your offerings stand out from the competition.
Adding a promotion asset to your Google Ads Performance Max campaign is straightforward and can be shown across all ad types, including search, display, and YouTube ads. Key elements to consider when setting up a promotion include selecting the right occasion—like Black Friday, Christmas, or a seasonal event—and specifying the promotion type, whether it’s a monetary discount or a percentage off. Consider using promo codes or setting minimum order values to encourage larger purchases.
Scheduling your asset is a crucial element because it allows you to set the promotion ahead of time, ensuring you don’t forget to turn it on or off. This helps align the promotion perfectly with your holiday timeline. Also, adding tracking parameters like UTM tags allows you to easily monitor performance, providing valuable insights into what drives the best results. This enables more data-driven adjustments, keeping your ads relevant and effective throughout the holiday season. This comprehensive strategy maximizes both visibility and conversions.
4. Personalize retargeting with Google’s customer match
Google’s customer match audience targeting option allows you to retarget existing customers based on their past interactions, making it a powerful tool for holiday marketing. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approaching, this strategy is crucial for connecting with relevant audiences and driving holiday sales. Customer match enables you to create personalized ads that remind customers of items they viewed or services they showed interest in. Plus, for businesses focusing on leads rather than sales, it’s an effective way to re-engage clients who booked services in the past, encouraging them to return during the holiday season.
As competition increases around the holidays—and cost per thousand impressions often spikes—reaching the right audience is critical. In recent years, Black Friday US retail sales saw a 7.5% increase in online sales, reaching $9.8 billion, while in-store sales grew by 2.5% year-over-year. This indicates the importance of effectively utilizing both online and offline marketing strategies to engage holiday shoppers.
Using customer match, you can strategically target individuals who have already engaged with your business, whether they signed up for a newsletter, made a previous purchase, or joined a loyalty program. Customer match provides a seamless way to combine your first-party data with Google’s consumer behavior insights, ensuring highly relevant ads.
This approach allows you to retarget customers across all of Google’s networks—search, YouTube, display, shopping, and Gmail—tailoring offers to those most likely to convert. Between automated audience targeting and integration with smart bidding, customer match leverages Google AI to enhance campaign performance and optimize your reach during key holiday periods, maximizing your potential impact.
5. Test different asset groups for varied audiences
The holiday season brings in diverse audiences. Create multiple asset groups within Performance Max, tailored to different segments of your audience—such as gift-givers, deal-hunters, or last-minute shoppers. Service-based businesses can use this tactic by creating ads that target different client types, like families, professionals, or retirees, with messaging that resonates with their needs during the holiday period.
Remember to treat your asset groups like traditional ad groups—they should be viewed as business themes, each relating to a distinct target audience and effectively representing a different customer persona. For example, a “last-minute shopper” persona might prioritize convenience, quick shipping, and ready-to-gift options, while a “budget-conscious parent” persona could be focused on finding the best deals for family gifts. Consider each persona’s needs, interests, pain points, and what they are searching for. This approach ensures that your messaging is highly relevant, leading to better engagement and conversion rates.
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6. Highlight local inventory and services
For brick-and-mortar businesses, highlighting your local presence is key to attracting foot traffic during the holiday season. Use Performance Max’s local campaign features to show ads to potential customers nearby. This approach is effective for service industries too—such as showcasing local services, in-store consultations, or holiday events that draw in local clients.
Ensuring that your Google Business Profile is correctly linked to Google Ads is crucial for this strategy. When properly set up, you can display location assets in your ads, making it easier for potential customers to find your physical store. This integration allows your ads to appear in Google Maps searches, increasing visibility among people actively looking for services or products near them.
Showing your location directly in ads enhances credibility, encourages in-store visits, and can lead to higher conversion rates, as customers are more likely to trust and choose a business they know is conveniently located.
7. Create urgency with time-sensitive messaging
Time-sensitive messaging can drive action. Utilize Performance Max to highlight deadlines, such as “ends soon!” or “limited-time offer.” Service-based businesses can incorporate urgency with bits of copy like “only a few spots left” for consultations, or “book by December 20th for a New Year’s discount.”
Note that another effective way to create urgency is with the countdown feature in Google Ads. While this feature isn’t available in Performance Max, it can be a powerful tool in your Google search ads. The countdown dynamically adjusts to show the exact time remaining for an offer, adding a real-time urgency that can encourage clicks and conversions.
8. Produce engaging holiday video ads with Performance Max
Use Performance Max to run video ads that appeal to holiday emotions and needs. Create engaging stories that align with your brand’s holiday offerings. Non-ecommerce examples include showcasing customer testimonials, holiday greeting messages, or educational videos highlighting seasonal tips or year-end advice.
Remember, Performance Max is heavily driven by AI, and the quality of data you feed into it greatly influences its performance. Google leverages a combination of images, videos, audience interests, and targeting criteria, along with headlines and descriptions, to optimize your Performance Max campaigns.
When it comes to videos, you don’t need to have pre-existing video assets to get started. The Performance Max asset editor includes a video template builder, allowing you to easily create videos with relevant holiday messaging. This feature is designed to quickly capture viewer attention and encourage clicks, making it ideal for the holiday season. When I discovered this capability, I found it incredibly convenient—it simplifies the process of creating effective video content tailored for conversions.
While the template builder is a great starting point, pairing it with your actual branded video assets, if available, can further enhance your campaign’s impact. But if you don’t have video assets on hand, the builder allows you to create impactful content effortlessly, ensuring your holiday messaging resonates with your audience.
9. Optimize high-value conversions with value-based bidding
Value-based bidding (VBB) allows you to maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns by prioritizing high-value conversions. This strategy involves assigning specific monetary values to different types of conversions based on their importance to your business, ensuring that Google’s algorithm focuses on what matters most to your bottom line.
Value-based bidding examples for holiday PMax campaigns
- Product purchases: In an ecommerce scenario, you can assign the actual product value to each purchase conversion. A premium product might be valued at $50, while a standard product could be valued at $20. This signals the algorithm to focus on users more likely to buy higher-value items, leading to better profitability.
- Form submissions vs. phone calls: If phone calls tend to convert at a higher rate, you could assign a $10 value to a phone call conversion and a $3 value to a form submission, guiding the algorithm to prioritize calls.
- Consultations vs. downloads: Assigning $20 to a scheduled consultation and $5 to a content download helps ensure the bidding strategy targets those likely to book a consultation, which is often a stronger lead.
Additional holiday bidding strategies
- Pass actual product value: For ecommerce, consider passing the exact value of each product as a conversion parameter. This approach gives Google’s algorithm precise information on what purchases drive the highest revenue.
- Early data collection with “add to cart” conversions: Initially, you can set the “add to cart” action as a primary conversion event with a lower value (e.g., $5) to help the algorithm gather data on customer intent. Once sufficient data is collected, you can transition to more refined conversion goals, like completed purchases, to better optimize the campaign.
10. Monitor asset group performance for real-time optimization
During the holiday season, trends can change rapidly. It’s essential to stay agile and monitor asset group performance closely to ensure your campaigns remain effective. Utilize Performance Max’s insights dashboard to get a clear view of which asset groups are driving the best results. This real-time data allows you to identify which search themes, headlines, and creatives resonate best with your audience, enabling you to make quick adjustments that optimize your strategy.
Even for non-ecommerce businesses, monitoring asset group performance can reveal which services or offers are capturing attention, allowing you to focus on what’s working and refine what isn’t. By actively using these insights, you can pivot your approach to maximize effectiveness throughout the holiday season. Here’s the video I have on how to look at individual asset group performance.
Set your PMax campaigns up for seasonal success
Incorporating these holiday marketing strategies will set your Performance Max campaigns up for success as the holiday season heats up. By leveraging the flexibility of PMax and following these targeted tactics, you can capture seasonal interest, engage the right audiences, and boost conversions across Google’s network.
Remember, the key to an effective holiday campaign is adaptability—monitor your performance closely and adjust your strategies as needed. For more help embracing the festive spirit through your search ad strategy, see how our solutions can make this holiday season your most successful yet!