Health & Wellness Advertising Tips To Drive Holiday Sales

The holidays are often thought of as retail season, shopping is at the top of everyone’s mind whether you’re buying products or selling them with a Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday promotion.

While this period is not correct, it also marks the beginning of high season for another great sector – health and wellness.

Many health and wellness advertisers are heading into the peak season that begins around the holidays and continues throughout the new year and into the first quarter—albeit for slightly different reasons.

You have health and wellness advertisers who might run Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday deals, like those selling OTC, vitamins and supplements, cosmetics, or CPG products.

But you’ll also see health and wellness advertisers that get a boost in searches during this period because they’re in the “use it or lose it” category of medical benefits (dental or vision, for example).

Diet and fitness advertisers will also begin to ramp up their activity early in the 2022 high season in anticipation of the “New Year’s Eve, You’re New” (NYNY) traffic they’ll see starting in January.

Even seniors’ facilities will start to see an increase in traffic in the first quarter after family members return home from seeing their loved ones over the holidays.

Here are some quick tips and housekeeping audits to make your ads deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time, and get the most out of the holidays this season.

The right message

An obvious start in promoting the right messages is to make sure you write ad copy and holiday messages that reflect the season and any promotions you’re running.

However, let’s not forget some important components of these messages:

Ad personalization tools

Use ad customizers, eg Countdown customization tools wow Insert keywords To make your ad copy relevant to the user’s search query, as well as to ensure that there is a sense of urgency to purchase and/or convert within the specified period.

FOMO (fear of missing out) can be a crucial component of messaging during this time, as the path down the buying funnel is much shorter than usual, so there is really a sense of urgency at play.

Ad addons

Many advertisers are focusing on changing strategy this holiday season because we are in a COVID recovery period where many are forgetting the daily housekeeping items that, while tedious at times, are also incredibly important for improving your ad’s relevance, quality results, and SERP competitiveness.

Make sure to check through any and all relevant Additional advertising information And make sure you are 100% approved across your account(s).

The vast majority can and should, as best practice, be added at the account level so that you have at least an exhaustive list.

Then, you can always specify if the campaign or ad group should have a different look (the most filtered level is the one that will take precedent).

Common ad extensions used during EOY seasonality are:

• • Sitelinks and Extended Sitelinks.
  • promotion extensions.
  • Price extensions.
  • work extensions.
  • Website extensions.
  • Callout extensions.
  • Structured snippets extensions.
  • Review accessories.
  • Merchant promotional messages for shopping campaigns.
  • Shipping Feedback for Shopping Campaigns.

appropriate audience

To deliver the right messages to the right audience, your campaign strategy needs to be tailored to this approach.

For example, during this high volume period where it is essential to your overall strategy for users to move down the funnel from awareness to conversion consideration, try segmenting your campaigns in a similar way.

Create generic, non-brand search campaigns and in-market audience campaigns for awareness and consideration play.

Then, use different levels of remarketing lists on “Objective” and “Bid” with specific messages to get users back on the thought-to-conversion funnel.

From an audit standpoint, at the very least, make sure you have all your in-market audiences and relevant remarketing lists associated with your campaigns at least in watch mode (the bid only setting with a bid modifier of 0%, so it simply collects data).

This will help inform future optimization decisions based on your own data.

However, to take advantage of this seasonality, it is also recommended to check and be sure At least +20% bid modifier on the most relevant audiences and that you review performance frequently.

Even if you use automatic bid strategies within the UI, those bids can act as a signal to the algorithm that you want to give more or less weight to selected audiences.

For in-market audiences, Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising have also begun to roll out to holiday audiences on Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday.

These can be very relevant and useful audiences to connect with and put a positive bid adjustment tool on them to help boost your performance.

The other perspective to take for related companies is exclusions.

Exclude your Converting Audiences (Remarketing) or Customer Match list from your existing campaigns to ensure that you only bring in those that haven’t converted within X number of days and that your ads and promotions only show to those that haven’t converted after you’ve moved through the funnel .

You can also use these same lists to target in their own campaigns and try to sell your products to them.

Good time

Make your campaigns show ads at the right time, too, by performing the following checks:

Ad scheduling

To take advantage of the increased searches, consider elevating any ad scheduling or daily split you have for the times you limit traffic, as search behavior is not the “norm” during this time.

At the same time, also make changes to raise bids when you see peak traffic and conversion times.

Automated rules

Automated rules It can be beneficial for several reasons during this time.

For example, you can automation Campaigns and/or ad copy to be launched and completed on a specified day/time.

You can also set up alerts to hit your inbox, or even have automated changes, when a campaign reaches its daily limit and budgets run out, in order to keep your ads running throughout the day and avoid them suddenly not showing.

To put your mind at ease, there is a setup that you can bypass on a max budget.

Keyword delivery

Be sure to run a quick keyword performance report and include a keyword view so you can see if there are, for example, non-brand or competitor exact match keywords whose bids are displayed below the first page, or branded keywords They are displayed below the main heading or the best position.

This is a quick way to ensure you stay competitive in the SERP, which is essential during peak seasons.

You can perform a similar audit of your Shopping campaign by pulling the product segmentation report to see if there are any products that are below standard bid and/or have low impression share.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

Dynamic Search Ads, or DSA, can be a great way to build an overview and capture any search terms that you may not target more specifically within your search campaigns.

You can also use this to search for relevant search queries by pulling in SQR periodically during the holiday season and adding it to your search campaigns.

Quick tip: Just be sure to add any exact match keywords you’re targeting in your search campaigns as negative keywords in your DSA campaign(s) to prevent overlap.

holiday words

Search behavior and queries during the holidays can be very different from what you might see throughout the year.

Ensure you monitor emerging and rising queries within your campaigns and the public sector as a whole, adding them to your campaigns and/or bidding as necessary.

Don’t know where to start? Do keyword analysis annually and make sure you add any relevant queries from the previous holiday season to your existing campaigns or create holiday campaigns.

Also, always reach out to your Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising representatives to ask if they can do a competitive keyword gap analysis or get any insights about your sector that you can benefit from.

These audits and analytics can help you make informed changes to your account so that your ads run at the right time when someone searches for your products or business.

summary

The holiday season is an important time for many health and wellness advertisers, and it’s essential to give your accounts the attention they need and deserve for your business to take full advantage of this seasonality.

Take the time to re-evaluate strategy, perform audits, and remember the basics to ensure the right messages are delivered to the right audience at the right time and that your Health & Wellness accounts…are healthy and well!

I hope you all have a very happy, healthy and safe holiday season.

More resources:

• 14 mistakes to avoid in holiday marketing campaigns
• 9 Essential Ecommerce Website Improvements to Increase Holiday Sales
• The Complete Guide to Holiday Marketing

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Featured image: Shutterstock / svetlanabalyn