How should we prepare for the holiday season?
It's best to get a head-start on any promotions you are planning for big holiday seasons (like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.).
For Black Friday & Cyber Monday, specifically, we recommend chooseing a site-wide discount. Your competition will be fierce, so it's a good idea to choose as steep of a discount as possible. If you need to temporarily hit a higher ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) in order to make this discount profitable, then we can easily do that.
Make sure any promotion you are offering in Google Ads is also offered in your other marketing channels. It's best to keep things synergistically across all platforms.
If your business is eCommerce, then you are probably running shopping campaigns. Shopping ads can promote discounts, special offers, free gifts, etc. right on the ad.
We can also promote the special deal directly in the text of any search ads that are running.
It can also be beneficial to create some images to support the promotion. We'll use these in the display campaigns to remarket to folks who visit the website during this time periot. A square version and a 19:1 ratio would work best, but Google has a long list aspect ratios they support, so more sizes means we are eligible to appear in more placements and therefore give the algorithm more opportunities to show the ad.
Google and all other ad platforms always experience a large increase in traffic during November and December. It can be a good idea to be flexible with the budget around this time -- meaning, if the audience size suddenly increases dramatically, then we will likely be able to spend more on the ads while continuing to meet a high return.