The holiday shopping season is coming to a close! We’ve made it past the rush of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, pushed hard through the opening weeks of December, and now there’s only 2 weeks left before 2019 officially arrives. Hopefully your sales have been piling up like snow during a blizzard, but wouldn’t it also be great to have an extra last-minute push to make the most of your Google Shopping campaigns as the holiday season tapers down?

2018 online holiday sales are on track to deliver another record breaking year, with estimates predicting $119.99 billion in U.S. online sales across November and December.  With overall traffic and sales surging, you may be wondering what final adjustments and actions you can take for your business before the holiday season is done.

If you’re making a list (and checking it twice) of Google Shopping campaign tactics try this holiday season, here are 3 tips for last-minute holiday shopping:

1 – Make Sure You’re Retargeting Past Customers

Trying to boost your sales from cold leads can feel as difficult as walking through snow barefoot. Luckily, if you use Customer Match and RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads), you’ve got the ideal tools to get your products in front of an audience that’s warm.

CustomerMatch will let you use both online and offline data to re-engage with customers across Google’s entire suite, including Google Shopping, Gmail, Search, and YouTube. You can use information your customers have already sharedwith you to target new ads to them. 

One of the best strategies is to segment target customers who purchased from you during the past 2-3 holidayseasons. Add those emails into Google Ads and increase your bid adjustments totarget them with your new Shopping ads.

RLSAwill help you customize your ads so you can target and tailor your bids for people who have previously visited your site. During the holiday season, it’s quite common for shoppers to do lots of research before buying gifts – you want to make sure they don’t learn all about a product on your site, but then end up buying it somewhere else. RLSA can help keep you top-of-mind with the shopperswho are most likely to buy.

2 – Get a Boost from Your Negative Keyword List

One counterintuitive way to get a boost in your holiday sales is to take advantage of your negative keyword list.

Most businesses use negative keywords to manage inefficiencies and keep costs down. While this is probably a smart move most times of the year, the holiday season presents a unique opportunity to earn a higher return on investment for certain queries.

Review the negative search terms you’recurrently using and try the experiment of giving them a chance to convert by removing them from your negative keyword list. Try just one at a time, and if they start having an adverse effect on your budget, you can always put them back on the negative keyword list.  But you may be surprised how one or two terms actually can help increase your revenue this time of year.

3 – Try Running Campaigns at Lower Efficiency

Efficiency matters – but during the holidays, it can actually be a better strategy to prioritize revenue over campaign efficiency.

Consider this holiday sales logic: right now, competition is tight, and cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition rates are increasing while return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) is decreasing.  If you run your campaign at a lower efficiency, you will spend more, but increased volume should result in increased revenue that makes the spend worth it.

For example, if your ROAS is 10:1, you’re theoretically making $20K for every $2K you spend. But that might not work this time of year. Now, if you drop your campaign efficiency so that your ROAS is 5:1, you’remaking $20K from every $4K you spend, but you’re hopefully beating your competition and making up the investment in sales volume.

If you’re willing to spend more at a reduce defficiency, you can reap the benefits of the surge in holiday traffic.

There are not many days left to the 2018 holiday season, but now is the time to make the most of last-minute shopping. Don’t forget to scale back your bidding as soon as the holidays are done, as demand will drop off immediately. But today there’s still time to revel in the holiday season.