What To Do With Your Google Ads Campaigns Over Christmas

Christmas demand drop incoming? 

In this episode of Google Ads Unleashed, host Jeremy breaks down exactly what to do with your campaigns over Christmas to avoid wasted spend and protect performance. 

Learn when to lower budgets, when to pause, or fully stop campaigns using data exclusions. A must-listen for media buyers planning a smooth shutdown and strong January restart.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

Hello guys, and welcome back to Google Ads unleashed. Hope everyone is prepared for Christmas already, because there's only going to be a few days up until the big day. And hopefully everyone will have some time off who's listening to the podcast, spending with family and friends and have regardless of faith and have a few lovely days off to recharge. Just for information, there won't be a podcast next week, but I will be returning with an absolute banger in the new year. I was able to get the great John Moran onto the podcast, founder of co founder of solutions eight, and he is one of the most interesting and compelling guys I've ever talked to in PPC. So don't, yeah, don't miss that episode comes out in the next few weeks. We're talking of Christmas. Today's episode is exactly about that, because you will probably want to know what on earth I'm going to do in the next few days with my ad accounts. Because, as you probably noticed already over the weekend, demand will have absolutely shut down. People don't know that they're not going to get their presents before Christmas anymore. People know that they are just going to push everything to the new year, not worry about that, etc, etc. As a result, what you do with your PPC campaigns, so something that you should have done by now is definitely lower your budgets. Okay, so realistically, there's there's three things, three ways you can approach this, in my opinion, and in my experience, that is the number one is what I mentioned already, you lower their budgets. Number two is that you pause everything about brand. And number three is that you actually pause all campaigns. But there's a twist to how you do that. So let's go with approach number one, that is lowering your budgets. So that's something that you should do anyway, because demand will massively go down for whatever you offer, whatever you do. And this is something that you definitely have to do already, okay to stop burning your budgets over Christmas, because typically people will not be buying sort of the Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, but then maybe from boxing day onwards, it'll go back up. So something that you may want to consider is taking advantage of the lull between Christmas and New Year, crimbo, or q5 as we sometimes call it, and maybe even run an offer, right? Because if you run an offer, there are people who will be Mindlessly scrolling and maybe searching for stuff, or maybe they got a gift card, or maybe they got money for Christmas, and then they can buy stuff. And if you are in a in the right niche, then this could be the right approach for you. Simply reduce budgets, plan in a sale for the coming days, maybe from the 26th to the first, and then slowly ramp up again on them days, in order to capture the demand that is in them days, that doesn't work for everyone. Obviously, it's also a bit of a personal choice. You know, are you off? Is your team off? Etc. We noticed, for instance, with a couple of our accounts last year that there has been actually quite a demand increase post Christmas. So which is why we, I'm, actually be, will be working in that time in order to satisfy the demand and to pump up the campaign budgets again at the same time, there is then alternative to and that is that you basically pause everything bar brand. Why let brand run? Because I'm not a big proponent of turning campaigns. Of turning campaigns off is pretty bad idea, generally speaking, just because they will almost never just seamlessly continue with how they were before. And as a result, very likely you will see very, very different behavior on that, on those campaigns, in order to mitigate that to a certain degree, I advocate letting brand campaigns run simply because you can then still capture certain conversion volume. And as a result, that conversion volume sort of pulls you through the day and keeps the algorithm. It's almost like stoking a fire, right? Always just keeping just one or two logs in there to keep the fire burning and to keep the embers going. And that's exactly the idea. You can pause everything about brand, let that run, and then in the new year, fire them campaigns again, and. Just restart from where you were. Then alternative three, what you can do over the next few days is something that probably a lot of you will consider, especially in lead gen, right? So this is something that probably is, in my opinion, one of the wisest moves, and that is to simply pause your entire ad account. Now you will be saying to me, Jez, if I pause my entire account, doesn't that contradict exactly what you said before, that you want to keep something going? Well, yes, to a certain degree, but also at the same time, there is a fantastic little feature in Google Ads called your data exclusion. And your data exclusion is the absolute easiest way to make Google not learn from bad data. Okay, so what you simply do is you head into your Google Ads account once you've paused your ad account. I've actually done this this morning with one of our accounts, which needed to be stopped today. You head to tools, budgets and bidding, then to adjustments, and then to exclusions, and then you can actually add a data exclusion in there. This means that your Google Ads account doesn't learn from bad data that is the ad account being paused, and in theory, it seamlessly continues smooth sailing once the data exclusion ends and you simply reactivate your Google Ads campaigns in the new year. Maybe a couple more things is you will want to check in more or less, if not every day, but you will want to check in every other day over Christmas just to see how things are going, because especially when you pause a lot of stuff, or, you know, mess with data exclusions, or if you mess with budgets and all that sort of stuff, it can have some pretty adverse effects. So as a result, I'd advise to just stay on top as much as possible in the coming days in order to, yeah, just keep, keep things, keep, keep things flowing, and keep things going the way they should. Fabulous. That's pretty much it. That's that's how you get through the holidays. And if that was been helpful, then please give this podcast a little review or subscribe. Would really help us, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the new year with a fantastic episode line. Now I'm so excited to do this. I've actually not done it yet as the time recording, it's happening this afternoon, but I am super excited, and so should be you, and it's going to blow your mind. This has been Jeremy young. You can find me on LinkedIn, Jeremy and Google ads. You can book a one to one consultation with me at young and digital dot marketing. You can also inquire about what our last one to one training slot in New Year. There's only one spot left now to have gone already, which is great, but I want to teach you, within 12 sessions, how to become a Google Ads ninja. Get in touch with our son something like you will want to do again. I wish you Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and I'll see you in the new year.