The holiday season is the biggest opportunity of the year for e-commerce brands—and also the most competitive. A comprehensive holiday PPC strategy is essential for success. The brands that win are the ones that start building awareness ahead of peak 2025 holiday shopping days and have a plan to capture intent when it spikes. Here are our key tactics to help your paid search campaigns stand out, scale revenue, and make 2025 your strongest Q4 yet.
Prepare Your Product Feed To Fuel Success
The foundation of any successful shopping campaign for an e-commerce brand is a healthy product feed. The information in the product feed is the lifeblood of those campaigns, and it greatly impacts performance. When potential customers search online, their query is matched to the fields in your feed—for example, product category, brand, color, and price. Check your product feed in Merchant Center for errors, missing attributes, or outdated information, and fill in missing fields to improve your match rate to relevant searches.
Pro Tips
- Consider including holiday-relevant search terms—“gift,” “Black Friday deal,” or “holiday sale”—in your product descriptions for increased reach.
- Check on products in your Merchant Center labeled “Needs attention.” Small fixes can make a huge difference in visibility. (To access these, navigate from Products & store to Products to Needs attention, as shown below.)
Build Consideration Now, Convert Later
One of the biggest mistakes e-commerce brands make during the holidays is waiting too long to get in front of their audience. By the time Black Friday rolls around, everyone’s fighting over the same bottom-funnel traffic. Instead, start building awareness early with upper-funnel campaigns.
We recommend using Demand Gen and YouTube campaigns to engage your audience before the buying frenzy begins. These channels are perfect for introducing your brand, building familiarity with key products, and getting shoppers into your remarketing lists before they start comparing deals. It takes time for potential customers to move through the marketing funnel, from awareness to consideration to conversion. They will often need to see your ads several times over the course of their customer journey, especially if they are just learning about your brand.
It’s best to use awareness-building tactics year-round, ramping up as you approach Q4. But if you haven’t dedicated marketing spend towards building consideration before, it’s not too late! Early November is a great time to start, as there is still some time before Black Friday and Cyber Weekend. Launching a Demand Gen or YouTube campaign now will still help you generate more sales during the upcoming holiday period.
Pro Tip
Consider segmenting your campaigns by New, Existing, and Lapsed customer groups as a way to target specific creative and messaging to each audience. The demand-generating period ahead of the holidays is a great time to engage each group in a specific way:
- Bring lapsed customers back to your website with re-engagement tactics.
- Reach net-new customers within your target audience.
- Remind existing customers of upcoming offers.
You can set up segmenting in the campaign setting section, under Customer Acquisition and Customer Retention. Read more information from Google here.
Set Up Your Messaging & Creative For Success
As you plan for the holiday period, it may be helpful to divide your messaging strategy into two broader phases: demand generation (leading up to the holidays) and conversion-focused (as the holidays begin).
Try to diversify your ads as you launch Demand Gen, YouTube, and other awareness campaigns to fill your funnel ahead of the holidays. For starters, use a good mix of image ads and video ads. Google’s best practice for Performance Max includes running video in every asset group for top results. Upload vertical and square versions! Test different ad styles, including promotional (product-focused), influencer-style, or evergreen branding, and adjust as results come in. Creative should never be set-and-forget.
As the holidays arrive, starting with Thanksgiving week, update your ad copy to inspire action. If you have a sale, you want everyone who sees your ads to know about it. Use promotion extensions, countdown timers, and urgency-driven language to grab attention. Launch promotions in your Merchant Center so they appear in Google Shopping. Update your Performance Max and Display assets with sales imagery and clear calls to action. And remember—your landing page should reflect the same seasonal offers your ads are promoting.
Pro Tips
- Activate your shopping feed in your Demand Gen and YouTube campaigns so they can drive awareness and sales at the same time. (Note that if you create a video campaign and select conversions as your goal, Google Ads automatically makes your campaign a Demand Gen campaign. You can still run just video ads, so this campaign is effectively a YouTube campaign with your shopping feed attached.)
- Consider launching ad groups that target key groups of products, attaching only those products within the feed for that ad group. Track lift in your corresponding conversion-focused campaigns. You should see a boost in traffic and sales in your conversion campaigns, stemming from your awareness campaigns. One good way to monitor the lift of your awareness efforts is by running a brand or search lift study. These initiatives give you a clearer picture, telling you if your Demand Gen or YouTube efforts are directly leading to an increase in brand awareness or a lift in search.
Adjust Budgets & Bidding for Surge Periods
Holiday traffic doesn’t just spike—it explodes. If your daily budgets are capped or your bidding strategy can’t keep up, you’ll lose valuable impressions right when intent is highest.
Review last year’s data to identify key surge dates (think: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, shipping deadlines). Pay attention to surges in traffic directly ahead of bumps in purchases. You should start scaling up spending in accordance with expected traffic surge dates. Then, make sure your campaigns have flexible budgets and set seasonality adjustments in Smart Bidding so Google knows your conversion rates will rise.
Pro Tips
- Schedule budget increases ahead of time, then scale them back after peak periods to avoid overspending once the rush slows down.
- Closely monitor ROAS, adjusting targets and budgets when applicable, to maximize profitability during this peak period.
In Summary
A successful holiday PPC strategy isn’t about one great ad or a single big sale. It’s about preparation, timing, and intentionality in guiding customers through the conversion funnel. By building awareness early, refining your product feed, setting up strong creative, and strategically managing budgets, you’ll be ready to capitalize when consumer intent is at its highest. Start early, stay agile, and use data to guide your decisions for a great holiday season.
Want to see how we can deliver for you during Holiday? We’re happy to dig in and discuss strategies for optimizing your spend across channels. Reach out to us using our contact form or connect with us on LinkedIn.
