If you are already running a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign for a retail business, chances are that you amped up your efforts for the holiday season. Adding information about holiday deals and sales to your ad content, focusing on holiday-specific keywords (including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two of the biggest shopping days of the year on- and offline), and possibly increasing your daily budget on certain shopping days has helped you to have a successful holiday season. How do you continue that momentum into the New Year?

Much success in Pay Per Click search engine marketing is come upon by trial and error. Evaluate what worked for you during the holiday season, and think about how it might be able to help you keep moving in the New Year, building a year-long strategy for Pay Per Click. Since many people shop for deals and overstock items immediately following the holiday shopping season, create a new campaign or a new ad group within an existing campaign, offering your own post-holiday deals. You may possibly want to keep your budget a bit higher in January to account for these potential clicks.

Moving forward, it is likely possible to lower your budget a bit and pause or end campaigns focused on holiday and overstock keywords. As you continue throughout the year, focus on keywords that are relevant to your specific products. This will increase the quality score of your ads, lower the CPC (cost-per-click), and bring you more relevant traffic at the purchasing stage. You will not receive as many clicks with these more specific keywords, but the clicks will be far more valuable, as they will be much more likely to lead to conversions.

Since late winter is traditionally marked by slower sales—unless you sell a lot of spring clothing-related items and cater to shoppers who are ahead of the game—this is a good time to do some testing within your account. Test more and more specific keywords to see which ones gain conversions and which do not. Try out different ad copy for some of your less successful keywords to see if that results in an improvement.

In April and May it may seem early, but it’s actually the ideal time to begin planning for the holiday season again. The majority of retail outlets are in the red until the holiday season, so this critical sales period warrants early preparation. By this point, you should have a good set of keywords and ads from your earlier testing that will bring in consistent conversions. Keep these campaigns and ad groups running and try out some more general keywords to see if those will work for you as well. If not, you can always pause or end the campaign.

Keep an eye on your budget and make sure it includes funds set aside for an increase in November and December. By that time, you should have some very specific keywords that are working for you, as well as some broader, more general ones that drive traffic to your site. When the time comes, you can add in your holiday, sale, and deal keywords, and you’ll be ready to go.

The keys to PPC are testing, adjusting, and planning ahead. Keep these in mind and you’ll have a successful 2010.