The Holiday selling season is here...are you ready?

The Holiday season is upon us. You need to move quickly (but prudently and systematically) to do everything in your power to maximize your profitability during this crucial selling season.

The holiday season is a different environment from what most Amazon sellers experience throughout the rest of the year. For some businesses, up to 75% or more of their total sales volume occurs during the holiday season.

Often during this time, customers will reduce the amount of time spent in researching their best purchasing options, in favor of just buying the gifts they need as fast and simply as possible.

It's a great time for a newbie or experienced Amazon seller to create PPC campaigns that place their businesses dead-center in the holiday gold rush.

Preparation creates opportunities for more profits per click

For those Amazon sellers who are prepared, they have an opportunity to enjoy higher sales volumes and conversion rates. But remember, just like the holiday season, this opportunity comes only once a year, so take advantage of our campaign optimization technology.

Here are some simple tips to help you to capitalize on the holiday selling season.

1.) Keyword research, this holiday season, plays an important role in determining whether you are successful with your PPC campaigns. Make sure that you have an accurate and up-to-date list of keywords so that you are targeting the appropriate audience and capturing the right traffic. You can use the PPC Entourage Amazon keyword tool to help!

You can clean up your current keywords and separate them out into the correct ad groups and campaigns quickly and easily by utilizing Power PPC to help you identify keywords you may need to add based on what is in your product inventory, as well as any keywords you may need to pause.

2.) Increase budgets and bids on high performing campaigns and keywords. During the holiday season, especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and after, shoppers are in a frenzied buying mode. Increase your budget to accommodate increased holiday traffic & competition. All your competitors are increasing their budgets and bids on prime Ad space to compete during the holiday season and you'll need to do the same.

Obviously before doing this, an important step is to identify which campaigns are bringing in the most money and what are your most profitable keywords. Unless you have hours to spend doing this (and who does during the holiday season), you can quickly gather this information using a resource like Campaign Optimization .

After you have identified your best-performing keywords, as long as you are staying within your Amazon ACoS Profit Zone, consider increasing, or at the very least shifting a larger portion of your budget, to your very best (highest ROI) campaigns and keywords.

3.) Create a strong Negative Keyword strategy in order to lower the bids on under-performing campaigns and keywords. Since your CPC often rises during the holiday season, it vital that you cut any needless Ad spend. The last thing you want to do is cause your budget that supports high performing keywords to be restricted because it's fighting for campaign budget with under-performers.

Negative Word Finder is a powerful tool that can assist any Amazon seller to optimize their holiday PPC campaigns by locking onto those words that are mostly likely to NOT produce a profitable sale. These words can then be added as negative phrase on either a campaign or Ad group level.

Negative Keywords work like a filter, creating more opportunities for your ad to display on searches that are relevant and could lead to conversions. They allow you to clean up your PPC campaigns by determining which words are not producing results.

For example: if you sell Mont Blanc pens, you need to add terms such as discount or cheap as negative keywords so that you don't end up bidding for these terms.

Ad spend can be eliminated, saving you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars during the holiday season and in the future, if done properly.

4.) Review your backend keywords to make sure the most popular search terms are included in your listings. If applicable, optimize your listings to highlight your products as great holiday gifts. Using our Search Term Optimization feature allows you to take your most popular and profitable keywords and search terms and add them to your backend keyword list in order of popularity, with the click of a button.

Be strategic in your approach to the holiday season, so that you can reap the rewards of the huge surges in search traffic to come in the weeks ahead and well into the New Year.