Seasonal products on Amazon often experience dramatic peaks and valleys in demand. For example, items like holiday decorations, winter apparel, or Halloween costumes may see huge sales at their peak season and near-zero sales at other times.
Seasonal products on Amazon are feast or famine. One month you’re drowning in orders, the next it’s crickets. In fact, many Amazon sellers earn the majority of their profit during these peak periods.
For perspective, Amazon data shows UK advertisers see 75% increase in sales by running Sponsored Products ads in the Christmas season. These examples underscore that a great peak-season campaign can make or break your annual results, so planning and managing it carefully is critical.
Amazon’s marketplace shows predictable shifts around events like Black Friday, Prime Day, or holiday seasons. For instance, searches for winter coats surge in cold months, while swimwear queries spike in summer.
By analyzing historical sales or search data (even Best Sellers Rank trends can reveal these cycles), sellers can forecast demand and plan accordingly. Download and study past reports from Seller Central (orders, search terms, etc.) to see when your products traditionally climbed.
Dual Campaign Strategy: Evergreen vs. Seasonal
A proven approach is to split your account into evergreen and seasonal campaigns. The evergreen campaign runs continuously with generic keywords that maintain baseline visibility (such as brand or broad product terms), capturing any off-season demand.
In parallel, run separate seasonal campaigns focusing only on high-intent holiday or event keywords (e.g. “Christmas lights”, “back-to-school supplies”) as their volume surges. Keeping them separate allows precise control: you can pause or cut back the seasonal campaign after the holiday without affecting your year-round ads. Key steps for structuring these campaigns include:
- Run distinct campaigns for your evergreen (non-seasonal) keywords and seasonal keywords.
- Schedule seasonal campaigns to begin in the “shoulder” period before the spike (often 4–6 weeks ahead).
- Plan to pause or minimize the seasonal campaign after peak, while keeping evergreen ads running at a low budget.
You can keep a tiny automatic campaign running off-season. Because you only pay per click, that minimal campaign still would pick up occasional sales without wasting spend.
In practice, you might treat campaigns like separate product lines. For instance, put winter coats in a “Holiday/Winter” campaign and summer shirts in a “Year-Round” campaign, so you can pause the winter ads in spring without affecting the summer ones.
Include brand-related terms (e.g. “[YourBrand] holiday gifts”) in your evergreen campaign to catch year-round searches. Only if a product truly has no off-season appeal (a “cliff” drop) should you turn off its ads entirely until needed again.
Keyword Strategy: Seasonal vs. Generic Terms
Your seasonal campaign’s edge lies in targeting precise event-driven keywords. Focus on season-specific phrases that mention the holiday or occasion (e.g. “Christmas gift ideas”, “summer grill accessories”, “Easter egg hunt supplies”). These high-intent terms surge as their event approaches. Complement them with qualifiers like “gift set” or “discount” to capture buyers, and include relevant trending modifiers (for example, “near me” or year-specific keywords).
Meanwhile, your year-round campaigns should contain generic or evergreen keywords. These are broad, product-descriptive terms without seasonal context (e.g. “LED string lights”, “garden bench”) that get steady traffic. Separating them means you can bid aggressively on seasonal terms during peaks while bidding conservatively on evergreen terms.
1. Match Type Strategy
Use match types strategically: broad match on general holiday terms and phrase/exact match on specific or core terms. For example:
- Broad-match “holiday home decor” to catch wide seasonal interest.
- Exact-match “best Christmas gifts 2025” for high-intent shopping.
- Phrase-match “string lights” to target anyone browsing lighting.
2. Shopper Behavior by Season Phase
Think of shopper behaviour in phases, too. Early in the season, consumers may use general planning terms (“holiday gift ideas” in October), while closer to the date they switch to purchase terms (“buy string lights” in December). You can adapt by shifting your keywords or bids over time to capture each wave.
3. Building the Keyword List
Use Amazon’s data to refine keywords. Analyze last year’s Search Term Reports to see exactly what people searched. Tools like the search bar’s auto-suggest or Brand Analytics can highlight seasonal phrases.
For example, if your product is a kitchen mixer, you might discover “holiday baking mixer” spikes in November. Include those in your ads and, if possible, weave them naturally into your listing titles/bullets for better relevance and Quality Score.
4. Negative Keywords
Filter out irrelevant traffic aggressively. During high-volume seasons, unwanted clicks multiply. Ignoring negatives is a costly mistake that wastes budget. Check your Search Term Report weekly and add negatives as needed (e.g. exclude unrelated searches or competing events). This ensures more of your budget goes to buyers, not browsers.
5. Tightly Themed Ad Groups
Group keywords by tight themes or product variants. For instance, in a holiday toy campaign, have separate ad groups for “educational toys” vs. “electronic toys,” each with its own ads and bids. This lets you allocate budget where it’s most effective. Run small-budget tests 4–8 weeks before peak to identify the winning keywords and products. Then as season arrives, shift budget toward those hot performers and refine bids.
Budgeting and Bidding Dynamics
Time your ad spend like a scalpel. Off-peak, keep budgets modest on your evergreen campaigns to maintain presence. As the season nears, ramp up budgets gradually. Start boosting daily budgets by 20–50% one month ahead. You can even schedule rules (e.g. Amazon’s budget rules) to automatically increase spend on key dates like Cyber Monday.
Expect competition to hike costs: CPCs can rise 20–50% during peak shopping. Proactively raise bids on seasonal keywords 1–2 weeks early (using last year’s timing as a guide).
At the same time, watch live metrics (impressions, clicks) and further adjust bids as real-time demand spikes. Crucially, concentrate your increases on the best keywords if “red holiday sweater” converts well, pour more budget there; if generic terms bleed spend without sales, trim them back.
Here is a sample pacing plan:
- Increase budgets (e.g. +30%) and get your top seasonal keywords ready.
- Allocate maximum budget to your highest-ROI keywords. Some sellers double their budget on main event days.
- Scale down gradually and drop budgets and bids by 30–50% rather than shutting off immediately. This captures any late shoppers and maintains momentum.
Additionally, use bid adjustments and automation. For example, enable Dynamic bids – down only to let Amazon lower bids if a conversion seems unlikely.
1. Placement and Bulk Operations
Apply placement multipliers: boost Top-of-Search bids (e.g. +20–50%) during high-volume hours. Use PPC bulk operations or rules to update many keywords at once if needed. If you find a campaign pacing too slowly (underusing budget), consider easing bids to grab more clicks; if pacing too fast, tighten bids or narrow match types.
2. Update Listing
For even finer control, creative and listing preparation matters. Update your product listing and ads for the season: add holiday keywords or symbols in titles, swap in a festive main image or bullet points.
3. Custom Store Lading Page
If you run Sponsored Brands, refresh the creative with seasonal visuals and link to a thematic store page (for example, a “2026 Holiday Gift Guide”). A relevant store landing page boosts conversion by matching shopper intent. Also, plan your budget for the entire season span Amazon advises funding early-bird shoppers, main shopping days, and late-season sales.
4. Dayparting
Use Amazon dayparting and analyze hourly reports to see when users convert best (for example, evenings or weekends). Increase bids during those peak hours and lower them during lulls. Small shifts can stretch your budget without losing visibility.
Sponsored Brands and Display Ads
Maximize impact by using multiple Amazon ad formats together. In addition to Sponsored Products, run Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display ads during peak times.
Create seasonal SB banners or videos linking to your Store or gift collection. For instance, feature your product against a festive backdrop with a headline like “Holiday Deals” or “Our Gift Guide”.
You can even use short videos (e.g. showing a product in holiday use) to grab attention. Ensure these ads point to a relevant landing page (like a seasonal collection page) to keep customers engaged.
For Sponsored Display, target related audiences: during the season, retarget viewers of your product or people browsing similar items (e.g. other gift categories).
Afterward, SD can re-engage holiday shoppers with related deals. Display ads often cost less per click, so they’re useful for broad reach and awareness even if direct conversion is lower.
In practice, run Sponsored Products for direct sales and ranking, Sponsored Brands for exposure, and Sponsored Display to capture additional segments. The formats complement each other: for example, an SB video might inspire a shopper to browse your store, then an SP ad closes the sale. Combined, they cover multiple touchpoints in the buyer’s journey.
In-Season Execution and Promotions
Once the season arrives, execution must be precise. Keep a close eye on inventory if stock is low, throttle that campaign before it runs out.
Next, coordinate promotions with your ads. If you have Lightning Deals, coupons, or bundles running, highlight them.
When you launch a Lightning Deal, increase bids on that SKU to maximize the deal’s visibility in search results. During each high-traffic day:
- Increase bids on proven, high-converting keywords (especially Top-of-Search).
- Quickly pause or lower bids on keywords or products that aren’t converting.
- Reallocate budget to your best performing campaigns and ad groups in real time.
- Add negatives daily to remove any new irrelevant traffic.
Stay agile. If a new trend emerges (e.g. a product featured in a popular gift guide), add relevant keywords on the fly.
Use Amazon’s reporting (which can be viewed hourly) to shift budget within the day if one product sells out or another spikes. Keep competitor activity in check: if your impression share drops, it may be time to increase bids.
Coordinating PPC with deals pays off. If your item is part of a deal, make sure ads promote that fact. Similarly, if you’ve bundled products for the season, advertise the bundle specifically (with its own keywords and lower ACoS targets).
1. Matching Spend To Stock
Your ad spend must be directly tied to your inventory sell-through rate. Set clear inventory thresholds that automatically trigger changes in your ad strategy to prevent stockouts and wasted money. For more on this topic, our guide on inventory management best practices is a valuable resource.
A common mistake is keeping ad spend at maximum until the last unit is sold. This depletes stock too quickly, halting sales and damaging organic ranking momentum. Once you stock out, your listing becomes invisible.
To avoid this, implement a tiered system:
- Full Inventory (100% – 50% Stock): Run campaigns with full, aggressive budgets.
- Reduced Inventory (49% – 20% Stock): Begin to reduce spend. Taper budgets by 25-30% and focus only on top-performing, exact-match keywords.
- Low Stock (Below 20%): Cut spend drastically or switch to low-budget brand defense campaigns. The goal is to avoid a complete stockout before the season ends.
Shoppers are in a “buy now” mode during peak season, leading to higher conversion rates for seasonal products. Data from 2026 indicates that searches for terms like ‘Christmas lights’ begin to spike in late October. Launching campaigns early to capture this initial wave can have a significant impact. One seller reported a 50% sales increase by starting their push in October and aligning it with their promotions. This careful alignment of timing, inventory, and advertising separates a profitable season from a costly one.
Post-Season and Off-Season Tactics
After the peak event, shift gears without shutting off instantly. Taper budgets and bids gradually. For example, if your holiday campaign’s daily budget was $200, you might reduce it to $100 for a couple of weeks rather than to zero. This catches late shoppers and preserves your product’s ranking.
If you have excess seasonal inventory, advertise it for clearance. Launch a dedicated clearance campaign with keywords like “discount [product]” or “sale [category]”. It’s fine if ACoS is higher here—your goal is to recoup cost and avoid storage fees. A few extra paid sales at a lower margin beat no sales at full price.
During the off-season, maintain a low-level evergreen campaign. Keep your top generic keywords running at minimal bids. Because traffic is sparse, you’ll pay very little while still catching any out-of-season buyers. This also ensures you keep earning reviews and sales rank, which primes you for next season. If your product is used globally, continue ads targeting different regions accordingly.
1. Building a Performance Report
Consolidate all your campaign data into a comprehensive report. The goal is to identify what drove performance, both positive and negative. To get a complete picture, you need to analyze your Amazon advertising reports.
Pull these specific data points:
- Identify exact match keywords that generated the most sales at or below your target ACoS.
- Determine which competitor products you successfully targeted and gained sales from.
- For Sponsored Brands or Display ads, identify which headlines, images, or videos had the best click-through and conversion rates.
- Analyze your performance by placement. Did “Top of search” justify higher CPCs with a proportionally higher conversion rate?
This analysis is critical. The 2026 Amazon PPC landscape is expected to see significant cost fluctuations during seasonal events. Data from recent Prime Day events showed that different days had vastly different conversion rates and ACoS, proving that a static strategy is ineffective.
2. Off-Season Engagement
After your analysis, the focus shifts to maintaining brand presence during slower months. Going completely dark is a mistake, as you’ll have to rebuild momentum from scratch. Run low-cost campaigns to keep your brand top-of-mind and build audiences for the future.
These campaigns are strategic investments in brand recall and customer loyalty, not immediate sales drivers.
3. Low-Budget Brand Awareness
You don’t need a large budget to stay visible. A few smart, low-spend campaigns can be effective:
Set up a Sponsored Display campaign with a small daily budget (e.g., $10-$20/day) to target shoppers who viewed your seasonal products but did not purchase.
Launch a low-bid, exact match campaign targeting your own brand and product names to protect your branded traffic from competitors.
Your off-season goal is to maintain a connection with the market at the lowest possible cost. A high ACoS on a small budget is acceptable if it’s feeding your remarketing lists for the next season.
3. Building Remarketing Audiences
This is the most powerful off-season activity. Customers who purchased from you during the peak season are your most valuable asset for the next one. Amazon’s advertising tools allow you to re-engage this warm audience directly.
Create audiences based on past purchases and target them with Sponsored Display ads as the next season approaches. For example, you could send an “early bird” offer for your new Halloween costumes exclusively to last year’s buyers. Conversion rates on these campaigns are almost always significantly higher than those targeting cold traffic.
This strategy turns one-time seasonal shoppers into loyal, repeat customers, increasing their lifetime value and giving you a significant head start on your Amazon seasonal products PPC efforts.
Data Analysis and Continuous Improvement
Your work isn’t done at season’s end. Immediately export all performance data search terms, placement reports, budgets before Amazon purges it. Then conduct a post-mortem:
- Which keywords and campaigns delivered the best return on ad spend (RoAS)?
- On which days or hours did you see the largest spikes?
- Did specific placements (e.g. top-of-search vs. product pages) outperform?
- Compare final results to targets: did you hit your revenue goals?
Use these insights to refine next year’s strategy. For instance, if late-December traffic was stronger than you predicted, plan to extend your campaign longer. If a particular ad group overspent without much sales, cut it or change its focus.
Also assess long-term impact. A strong holiday campaign can lift your organic ranking and reviews. If many buyers reviewed your product after the holiday, you’ll start the next year with more social proof, which can reduce your CPCs. Over time, this compounding effect makes each season’s PPC more effective.
Key metrics to monitor include ACoS vs. your profit margin, search impression share, and incremental sales. Document everything. Even a simple spreadsheet of last year vs. this year’s performance can guide budgeting and bidding decisions.
Avoid analyzing performance in a vacuum. Focus on total season ROI and customer acquisition rather than chasing daily ACoS swings. One slow day may still convert later.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Even seasoned advertisers can slip up. Key mistakes to watch out for include:
- Starting too late: Launch planning and testing at least 2–3 months before the peak.
- Underfunding campaigns: If you run out of budget midday, you lose the market. Add a 20–30% buffer to peak-day forecasts.
- Abrupt shutdown: Killing ads immediately after the event wastes momentum. Taper instead.
- Ignoring negatives: High-traffic seasons bring irrelevant clicks fast.
- Poor campaign structure: Mixing seasonal and evergreen keywords limits control.
- Short-term ACoS focus: Judge performance on full-season returns, not single days.
- Forgetting post-launch adjustments: Continue optimizing daily.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is straightforward advice on common questions brands have about seasonal PPC, based on years of campaign management experience.
When Should I Start Seasonal PPC Campaigns?
Launch your campaigns 6-8 weeks before your peak season. This is not about spending your budget early; it’s a strategic move.
This “pre-season” period is an opportunity to gather performance data, identify effective keywords, and build relevance with Amazon’s algorithm. CPCs are lower, and competition is less intense. Starting early signals to the algorithm that your product is relevant for key search terms, which can result in better ad placements and lower costs later.
For Christmas, you should launch initial campaigns in early to mid-October. This provides enough time to validate your keyword strategy and build a performance history before the Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic surge.
How Do I Budget for Short Events Like Black Friday?
A standard daily budget is ineffective for short, high-traffic sales events. For days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you need to think in hours, not days. Use Amazon’s “Budget Rules” feature or manually increase your daily budget to 3-5 times your normal spend.
Monitor your campaigns almost hourly. If your most profitable campaign runs out of budget by noon on the biggest shopping day of the year, you are giving sales to competitors. It’s better to set an aggressive budget and use Top of Search placement modifiers to secure prime ad real estate.
The worst mistake is letting a high-performing campaign go dark mid-afternoon on Cyber Monday. Set a high budget and check in frequently. The opportunity cost of an exhausted budget is far greater than the risk of a slight overspend.
What Do I Do with Campaigns in the Off-Season?
Do not pause your campaigns. Pausing a campaign for months erases its performance history, forcing you to start from scratch next year.
Instead, reduce their activity significantly. Lower budgets to a minimum and pause keywords with zero impressions. Keep a small “maintenance” campaign running with a few of your core, most relevant keywords. This preserves the campaign’s history so it’s ready to scale when needed.
This approach also allows you to collect valuable search term data year-round at a minimal cost. You can also use the off-season to run Sponsored Display ads to remarket to past buyers, keeping your brand visible and building an audience for the next peak season.
How Do I Prevent a Stockout from Affecting Ad Campaigns?
Your ad strategy and inventory levels must be synchronized. This requires establishing clear rules, not guesswork.
Set specific inventory thresholds that automatically trigger budget changes. For example, once stock drops below 50%, taper ad spend by 20-25%. When stock reaches a critical 20% level, pull back aggressively, running ads only for brand defense and your top-performing, highest-margin exact-match keywords.
This controlled ramp-down prevents a sudden stockout that can damage your sales velocity and organic rank. It is always better to sell your last unit on the final day of the season than to sell out a week early and become invisible to shoppers.
