Historically, the holiday season has been a time for companies to ramp up their marketing and outreach strategies—understanding that what has worked for them over the last few months won’t necessarily work in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Hanukah, and Christmas.

PPC marketing is no exception. As a general rule, PPC requires a steady, even-keel approach; Google doesn’t always respond well to sudden shifts in your campaign, especially if those shifts involve you spending less money. Yet there are some subtle variations to your PPC strategy that may help you make the most out of the holiday shopping season—and the time to implement them is now.

Understand How the Customer Changes

People think of PPC as hinging on search engine algorithms and other technicalities. Actually, it’s very much driven by human psychology and consumer behavior. That is never truer than during the holiday season.

One thing to understand is how customers might want different things during the Christmas shopping season than they typically do during spring, summer, and fall. Here’s an example: One of our clients is a car wash company—and while their business is pretty heavily focused on the actual car washes during spring and summer, their focus shifts to gift cards during the holidays.

And that’s important to remember: Once we get into November, and through the end of the year, people are going to be looking for gift ideas more than anything else—and that absolutely impacts the kind of keywording and targeting you do with PPC.

Play Into Sales and Specials

But there are other seasonal keywords worth noting, too. A lot of them are going to hinge on festive sales. Certainly, for companies that have special promotions or discounts during the holiday shopping season, sales- and event-related keywords are going to be huge.

And in particular, think about Cyber Monday. The biggest online shopping day of the year is certainly something that’s going to have an impact on PPC terms. With our own clients, we start implementing Cyber Monday keywords well in advance of the big day itself.

Do Your Research

Of course, it never hurts to make cold, hard data the pivot point for your PPC campaign. For example, it’s always smart to look at last year’s holiday season keywords, and see if there were any that generated particularly big gains. Any positive outlier is going to be worth repeating, or at least worth attempting.

Don’t just look to your own past numbers, though. Look at what your competitors are doing over the holiday season, and think about what you need to do to be competitive. If their PPC ads make mention of discounted shipping or free gifts, you may have to sweeten your own offer a bit, just to even things out.

Should You Increase Your PPC Spend?

Is it wise to increase your PPC spending over the holiday season? That’s a common question without a straightforward answer, as it really depends on the product in question. What we will say is that many of our own clients do benefit from upping their spending just a bit, especially companies that really need to clear a lot of product in the last weeks of the year—like, for example, automotive dealers.

Heading into the holiday shopping season, make sure you look closely at your company’s PPC activity—and think about the little changes you might make to emerge even more competitive during this busy time of year.