2024 Holiday Guide: Maximizing Paid Search

Adapting Your Paid Search Strategy in 2024

This Q4, there are three key ways that the paid search landscape will differ from 2023. First, elevated costs are being driven by heightened spending on search platforms (expected to rise by +11.1% in 2024) despite declining impression rates. Second, increased competition from platforms like Amazon and TikTok, which are capitalizing on shifting consumer search behaviors, continues to disrupt traditional search channels.

Here’s how we’re managing the current paid search landscape to help New Engen clients succeed in Q4:

1. Using campaign consolidation and strategic bidding through portfolio bid strategies which allow for TROAS bidding with a maximum CPC limit. These will be big areas of opportunity to maintain efficiency when CPCs are high.

2. If there is budget constraint but volume is still the priority, capitalizing on high volume, low cost Non-Brand PMAX campaigns and segmenting asset groups by product category or search themes. With restricted budgets it may be beneficial to consolidate Non-Brand efforts from separate search & PMAX efforts to one PMAX campaign.

3. While awareness campaigns are most impactful in the early holiday season, conversion efforts could benefit from ramping in late November with any extra dollars supporting December - especially knowing Cyber Monday will fall on December 2nd this year. CPCs are expected to be more efficient in December compared to November which provides the perfect opportunity to capture last minute shoppers & self-gifters, even more so if there will be one more holiday sale before the year ends.

Best Practices for Managing Your Paid Search Campaigns in Q4

We asked New Engen’s paid search experts to roundup a list of best practices to live by in Q4 - here’s what they said:

Gradually scale spend in the days leading up to a sale.

• Pro Tip 🔥 Use seasonal bid modifiers and data exclusions post-sale to bring costs down quickly and efficiently.

Segment your Non-Brand PMAX or Shopping campaigns for better control over budget allocation.

• Segmenting by key product categories, for example, is a good tactic for pushing specific product SKUs and high-value keywords.

• Be sure to look at recent performance history to understand which categories are currently driving strong CVRs or other key metrics.

Capitalize on all creative opportunities at your disposal.

• Always utilize all available headlines & descriptions.

• Pro Tip 🔥 If you’re running single-day promotions or multiple offers, leverage campaign-level headlines and descriptions for an added layer of creative support.

Finally, don’t forget to cover all of your bases.

• Make sure ad copy is updated to include any important seasonal call outs and test holiday-specific messaging as relevant to your brand.

• Enable the correct campaign negatives to ensure that your ads are only served on relevant search queries.
• Review any automated rules in place to launch promotion specific assets or campaigns
• Double check that tracking is enabled (and functioning properly) across all campaigns.