Why you need to start thinking about Christmas Strategy
November 25, 2021

Last year was unlike anything we have ever seen before. The word unprecedented has probably been used the most in the last 24 months than any year prior combined. Since the COVID pandemic started the world has undergone significant change, and businesses have been forced to adapt to a new economic landscape.

As lockdowns start to ease, borders open up and families are reunited this year for Christmas it's fair to say that celebrations are going to be a lot bigger this year compared to last year. Whilst face to face gatherings will be a big shift from last Christmas, the online shopping trend hasn't faded. Consumers have had to conform to online shopping this year even more so as lockdowns were effectively in place for most of NSW and VIC, and so much uncertainty shrouded end of year plans. Ecommerce stores have found their groove since last year, meaning there's increased competition out there and a better level of quality of the competition also.

1. Understand the major shopping period

The Christmas shopping period starts for most people on Black Friday, which is the fourth Friday in November. People are looking out for deals on the gifts they want to buy, so it is a great sale period to capitalise on.


In 2019, A Shopify study found that most businesses prepare for Black Friday planning usually in August and September but some as early as May. If you haven’t started yet you’re already behind, but fear not! You still have time to plan and promote a Black Friday event that gets people excited about your businesses products or services as gifts for their loved ones.


After Black Friday, it's a rather short run up until Christmas, so it's incredibly important that your processes are working smoothly so that you can keep all your customers happy. Think about solving any hiccups in your delivery process, or your booking process, or any other process to allow your customer the most frictionless experience. Good processes also mean fewer headaches for your business during the holiday season. Remember, people are shopping earlier this year, so preparation is key.

2. Focus on customer acquisition and retention

Retaining old customers is a lot more cost effective than acquiring new ones. Your strategy needs to shift away from pure selling and towards building trust. Developing strong relationships with your customer base is the best thing you can do to ensure your revenue over this season.


If your business is service-based, your focus right now should be strong client relationships, communication of key dates and service availability between now and the beginning of 2021. If your business is B2B, your focus should be planning staff leave, ensuring all clients are aware of holiday dates and serviceability throughout the holiday period, as well as having clear communication across all channels indicating to potential new clients the serviceability and availability between now and the beginning of 2022. Ecommerce businesses need to clearly state delivery cut off dates, time frames and whether there'll be any delays for order processing.


Different types of businesses will need to communicate different things, but if you make sure your strategy is geared towards communication and trust with your customers, you're putting your business in a strong position.

3. Ensure strong digital marketing activities

This has been full of change and transitions for digital marketing. With things changing so rapidly all the time, social media provides the opportunity to be flexible and to put out new messages as they become relevant.


You should be utilising any social media accounts right now to keep your audience informed and engaged, and if you haven't dabbled in Facebook, Instagram, or Linkedin advertising, now might be the time to start. Ads are relatively cheap and you can go where your audience is and target them very specifically.


Now is also the time to be utilising your email list, sending out regular updates, and working to grow your email list ahead of the holiday season. A segmented strategy can help retain and convert even more customers for you, and our team can help. Get in touch with us if you would like to know more about growing your email list, or social media marketing that will convert into sales for your business.

4. Focus on your online presence

Online shopping gets bigger and bigger each holiday season. The opportunity for eCommerce businesses is enormous, but you have to make sure your web presence is flawless so you can capitalise on this as much as possible.


Make sure your Google Business account is up and running, and fill in all of the information that will help customers. This includes your opening hours including any special hours over the holiday period and your accurate contact details.


For Ecommerce business, this might also be the perfect time to set up Google shopping (hint - it is!), which is an easy way for customers to find your business and your products online. We suggest chatting to our team to see if Google Shopping could be a good fit for your business to take advantage of. Google Shopping listings are also FREE, with the option to implement a paid strategy also.


You also want to make sure your website is fully optimised with correct information, as well as intuitive design and shopping features. If you’re closing over the holiday period this could be a great time to work on your website. We can help with affordable web design options and have a relatively fast turnaround time for new sites.

You need to start thinking about Christmas now and adapt your business strategy for a more digitally-focused holiday period. At Pup Digital, we are offering free consultations to anyone who knows they need to be working on a strategy but isn’t sure exactly what to focus on. We’ll help work out your priorities based on your business goals and budget. All without obligation, and you’re more than welcome to work on the strategy yourself after your consultation with us. Get in touch today, we'd be thrilled to assist.

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August 21, 2026
The Client AGA Air Conditioning is a Canberra-based heating and cooling specialist delivering residential and commercial installation, servicing and maintenance across the ACT. AGA had built a strong reputation through quality workmanship, referrals and customer service. What it needed was a digital and acquisition sy stem that matched the standard of the business and its growth ambitions, one built to support serious, sustained investment rather than one-off campaign spend. PupDigital was engaged in a multi-year partnership to bring the website, conversion tracking and paid media strategy together into a single, connected acquisition system. The Challenge AGA was already a trusted local provider, but its website and advertising weren't working together as one system. The site needed to better communicate the quality of the business and give prospective customers a clearer path to enquire. At the same time, the advertising account needed to become far more commercially disciplined. Heating and cooling demand shifts significantly through the year, and customer intent moves quickly between installation, servicing, evaporative cooling and gas heating, each with different commercial value. Residential and commercial enquiries needed to be treated differently, and the business's own capacity to take on work had to be factored into how aggressively the account was scaled. It's the kind of complexity we see all the time working with trades, services, and building and construction businesses. It's genuinely where we do our best work. A broad, static campaign was never going to cut it here. The goal wasn't more traffic, it was a system that turned demand into real, valuable enquiries, built to scale as the business did. Our Strategic Approach 1. Rebuild the Conversion Experience The first priority was improving what happened after someone clicked an ad. PupDigital designed and developed a new website that better reflected AGA's positioning and made its services easier to understand, with: Clearer service pathways for residential and commercial customers Improved mobile usability and more direct calls to action Tighter alignment between ad campaigns and the landing pages they led to Simplified enquiry journeys The website was built as part of the acquisition strategy, not a separate branding exercise. Every campaign needed to send customers to a page that matched their intent and made the next step obvious. 2. Improve the Quality of the Data Better optimisation depends on measuring the right things. PupDigital strengthened conversion tracking across the site and ad account, including enquiry forms and tracked phone calls, and critically, stopped treating every conversion as equal. AGA's feedback made clear that phone calls often represented stronger opportunities than lower-intent web actions. Tracking and optimisation were refined accordingly, shifting the strategy away from simply increasing reported conversions and towards improving the quality of the enquiries being generated, the metric that actually matters to a business owner's bottom line. 3. Structure Campaigns Around Demand and Commercial Value Rather than one broad, always-on campaign, PupDigital structured the account around AGA's core service categories and how demand moved seasonally, giving granular control over which services were promoted, how budget was allocated, and the messaging and landing pages each audience saw. This meant investment could be increased where strong opportunities existed, pulled back where intent was weaker, and kept continuously aligned with the work AGA actually wanted to win, not just the work that was easiest to generate leads for. Scaling Investment With Confidence As performance and enquiry consistency improved, PupDigital progressively scaled AGA's monthly ad investment, growing it 300% over the course of the partnership. This wasn't a case of increasing spend and hoping volume followed. Every scaling decision was informed by conversion performance, search demand, lead quality feedback, seasonal opportunity, and AGA's real capacity to service new work. Growth in ad spend only compounds when the wider system, website, tracking and campaign structure, can convert that investment efficiently. Building that system first is what allowed AGA to keep increasing investment with confidence, rather than second-guessing where the budget was going. The Results Following the website launch in May 2025, AGA's Google Ads performance improved substantially against the preceding period: Conversions up 14% 18.71% conversion rate, a 77% improvement Impressions up 22% Monthly ad investment scaled 300% across the partnership The standout result was conversion rate, not raw traffic volume. The campaigns didn't need to chase the largest possible audience. They became more focused on reaching people actively searching for AGA's services and directing them into a stronger website experience. The result was a materially higher percentage of visitors taking meaningful action, a more efficient acquisition system, not just a busier one. Broader Business Growth: A Harvey Norman Commercial Contract Throughout the partnership, AGA continued expanding its residential and commercial workload, including securing a significant commercial contract with Harvey Norman Commercial, alongside a growing volume of rough-in and fit-off work. 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AGA moved from a fragmented digital setup to one connected system for attracting and converting customers, and gained: A website that reflects the quality and scale of the business Clear visibility over what's actually driving enquiries, not just what's easy to report Granular control over service-specific and seasonal demand Confidence to keep increasing investment because the system converts it efficiently A digital foundation that supported the business's move into larger commercial work This is the throughline in how PupDigital works with trades, services, and building and construction businesses: advertising is never managed in isolation. It's shaped by the type of work a business wants, the enquiries it actually values, and the capacity it has to deliver, because that alignment, not spend for its own sake, is what drives real business growth. 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The Client AGA Air Conditioning is a Canberra-based heating and cooling specialist delivering residential and commercial installation, servicing and maintenance across the ACT. AGA had built a strong reputation through quality workmanship, referrals and customer service. What it needed was a digital and acquisition sy stem that matched the standard of the business and its growth ambitions, one built to support serious, sustained investment rather than one-off campaign spend. PupDigital was engaged in a multi-year partnership to bring the website, conversion tracking and paid media strategy together into a single, connected acquisition system. The Challenge AGA was already a trusted local provider, but its website and advertising weren't working together as one system. The site needed to better communicate the quality of the business and give prospective customers a clearer path to enquire. At the same time, the advertising account needed to become far more commercially disciplined. Heating and cooling demand shifts significantly through the year, and customer intent moves quickly between installation, servicing, evaporative cooling and gas heating, each with different commercial value. Residential and commercial enquiries needed to be treated differently, and the business's own capacity to take on work had to be factored into how aggressively the account was scaled. It's the kind of complexity we see all the time working with trades, services, and building and construction businesses. It's genuinely where we do our best work. A broad, static campaign was never going to cut it here. The goal wasn't more traffic, it was a system that turned demand into real, valuable enquiries, built to scale as the business did. Our Strategic Approach 1. Rebuild the Conversion Experience The first priority was improving what happened after someone clicked an ad. PupDigital designed and developed a new website that better reflected AGA's positioning and made its services easier to understand, with: Clearer service pathways for residential and commercial customers Improved mobile usability and more direct calls to action Tighter alignment between ad campaigns and the landing pages they led to Simplified enquiry journeys The website was built as part of the acquisition strategy, not a separate branding exercise. Every campaign needed to send customers to a page that matched their intent and made the next step obvious. 2. Improve the Quality of the Data Better optimisation depends on measuring the right things. PupDigital strengthened conversion tracking across the site and ad account, including enquiry forms and tracked phone calls, and critically, stopped treating every conversion as equal. AGA's feedback made clear that phone calls often represented stronger opportunities than lower-intent web actions. Tracking and optimisation were refined accordingly, shifting the strategy away from simply increasing reported conversions and towards improving the quality of the enquiries being generated, the metric that actually matters to a business owner's bottom line. 3. Structure Campaigns Around Demand and Commercial Value Rather than one broad, always-on campaign, PupDigital structured the account around AGA's core service categories and how demand moved seasonally, giving granular control over which services were promoted, how budget was allocated, and the messaging and landing pages each audience saw. This meant investment could be increased where strong opportunities existed, pulled back where intent was weaker, and kept continuously aligned with the work AGA actually wanted to win, not just the work that was easiest to generate leads for. Scaling Investment With Confidence As performance and enquiry consistency improved, PupDigital progressively scaled AGA's monthly ad investment, growing it 300% over the course of the partnership. This wasn't a case of increasing spend and hoping volume followed. Every scaling decision was informed by conversion performance, search demand, lead quality feedback, seasonal opportunity, and AGA's real capacity to service new work. Growth in ad spend only compounds when the wider system, website, tracking and campaign structure, can convert that investment efficiently. Building that system first is what allowed AGA to keep increasing investment with confidence, rather than second-guessing where the budget was going. The Results Following the website launch in May 2025, AGA's Google Ads performance improved substantially against the preceding period: Conversions up 14% 18.71% conversion rate, a 77% improvement Impressions up 22% Monthly ad investment scaled 300% across the partnership The standout result was conversion rate, not raw traffic volume. The campaigns didn't need to chase the largest possible audience. They became more focused on reaching people actively searching for AGA's services and directing them into a stronger website experience. The result was a materially higher percentage of visitors taking meaningful action, a more efficient acquisition system, not just a busier one. Broader Business Growth: A Harvey Norman Commercial Contract Throughout the partnership, AGA continued expanding its residential and commercial workload, including securing a significant commercial contract with Harvey Norman Commercial, alongside a growing volume of rough-in and fit-off work. Landing a contract like that comes down to the quality of AGA's work and reputation, not an ad campaign in isolation. What it does show is the broader trajectory of the business during our partnership, and the part PupDigital played in making sure AGA's digital presence could keep up with, and represent, that scale of growth. Winning commercial-level work like this means having a website and digital presence that looks and performs the part, and that's what we focused on throughout. The Business Impact The most valuable outcome wasn't any single campaign result or website metric. AGA moved from a fragmented digital setup to one connected system for attracting and converting customers, and gained: A website that reflects the quality and scale of the business Clear visibility over what's actually driving enquiries, not just what's easy to report Granular control over service-specific and seasonal demand Confidence to keep increasing investment because the system converts it efficiently A digital foundation that supported the business's move into larger commercial work This is the throughline in how PupDigital works with trades, services, and building and construction businesses: advertising is never managed in isolation. It's shaped by the type of work a business wants, the enquiries it actually values, and the capacity it has to deliver, because that alignment, not spend for its own sake, is what drives real business growth. Conclusion AGA Air Conditioning shows what's possible when a website, tracking and paid media strategy are treated as one connected system, working together, rather than three separate pieces bolted on side by side. PupDigital's role was never simply to drive more clicks. We rebuilt the customer journey, strengthened measurement around what actually matters, aligned campaigns with seasonal and commercial priorities, and built a structure capable of supporting significantly increased investment, investment AGA could scale with confidence because the underlying system was built to convert it. The result: a 77% improvement in Google Ads conversion rate, a 300% increase in monthly ad investment, and a stronger digital foundation that helped support AGA's move into larger-scale commercial work.
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