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Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing

A person presenting a gift with holiday themed wrapping.

The holidays are always a busy season, and not just because of all the family occasions. The holiday season is also important for every business as eager shoppers and clients look to check friends and family members off their lists (plus a little for themselves). To get ahead, businesses need to carefully plan and execute on their digital marketing. However, that takes a lot of attention, energy, and effort while other parts of a business are also demanding more attention for the busy season. You also can’t just abandon that marketing either. We explain why holiday marketing is important in 2025 and why you should leave DIY to festive crafts

The Importance of Marketing in Holidays 2025

Holiday marketing should always be a key part of a business’ annual strategy, but that’s even more true for the holiday season in 2025. It’s relatively obvious that this year has had some economic constraints, which has led to many customers and clients being a little more mindful with their spending. That will be the same going into the holiday season, where Canadians are projected to spend an average  $1,675 on gifts, entertainment, and travel. While an increase from 2023, this is notably 10% less than last year and 81% of Canadians said they were cutting back to save money.

This means that businesses need to be focusing their effort to convince customers and clients that they are worth their dollars. That can only be accomplished with sound marketing that reaches those potential clients and customers. Marketing of this kind takes strategy, creative asset creation, and digital account management, which in turn takes a lot of effort and expertise.

Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing – The Benefits of Outsourcing

All that effort and expertise, and the importance of holiday marketing in 2025 is exactly why businesses should outsource their marketing to an agency. There are numerous benefits this yields for a business, especially during this busy season:

  • Expertise: Outsourcing to a marketing team means getting access for a full team of marketing experts rather than needing to hire your own staff. This ultimately saves costs while ensuring you receive a team of knowledgeable experts that are effective for your holiday marketing.
  • A clear digital strategy: All those experts specialize in specific marketing channels. Together they can create a comprehensive and clear marketing strategy for the holidays which they know will work for your business and audience much more efficiently than non-experts trying to devise something that might work.
  • Active social media and reaching inboxes: Social media management is yet another huge responsibility. Between answering a flood of messages and comments and finding the time to network and connect with other accounts, it consumes valuable time that could be spent on other aspects of your business. However, those connections are a vital part of social media marketing. Similarly, email newsletters are a great way to maintain customer connection, but they can take a lot of time and energy to create. By outsourcing to an agency, you allow an expert team to manage these and keep your digital marketing active.
  • Focus on your business: This is one of the biggest ones. Outsourcing to an agency always helps a business with capacity concerns. Rather than dedicating team members to marketing efforts, a business gets the more efficient time and energy of a team of marketing experts who will accomplish more in less time. That is even more important during the holidays when you and your team need to focus on the business and your clients. Plus, you can all get time to enjoy the holidays with friends and families!
  • Retention Post-Holiday Sales: The holiday season generates an enormous volume of new leads and first-time customers, but this is where many businesses slip back into DIY marketing mode, treating it as a one-and-done event. An expert marketing agency views the 2025 holiday marketing period not just as a sales blitz, but as a long-term customer acquisition strategy. They implement a robust post-holiday strategy designed to convert those one-time shoppers and gift recipients into loyal, year-round clients. This crucial next step involves sophisticated audience segmentation, timely email campaigns (since email remains a high-ROI channel), and targeted social retargeting to maximize the long-term value of every customer acquired. By choosing to outsource marketing, you ensure that your business avoids the January slump and capitalizes on your biggest sales period, making your marketing Christmas investment truly pay off.

Leave DIY to the Christmas and Holiday Crafts

You should now have a sense of the general benefits of outsourcing your marketing agency along with the particular benefits for the upcoming holiday season. It isn’t too late to start strategizing and getting your marketing going, whether it’s your social media, email, ads, or any other digital marketing. Just like your holiday shopping, you shouldn’t leave it to the last minute. So contact the experts at Rosewood Marketing.

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Google Ads is Updating its Healthcare and Medicine Policy in 2025

A doctor holding a tablet with a patient, thematically related to recent updates by Google Ads for its Healthcare and Medicine policy

Google Ads regularly publishes updates and changes to its many policies. Some of these changes are minor or extremely specific with little effect on most advertisers. Others can be more serious, such as the recent updates by Google to its Healthcare and Medicines policy in July and August 2025. We’ll explain what these recent changes mean, who they affect, and what you may need to do.

What is Google Ad’s Update to its Healthcare and Medicines policy?

At the start of August 2025, Google published a notice that it would be updating its enforcement of the Google Ads Healthcare and Medicines policy. The update stated, “The Restricted Medical Content label, which enables eligible certified advertisers to target prescription drug keywords, will be deprecated.” This label was essential for any advertising products or services with ads that targeted prescription drug keywords.

The update means that Google Ads will no longer be using this label. However, ads targeting prescription drug keywords will still be permitted on the platform. Furthermore, since the label is being deprecated, advertisers will still see it as an available option. However, its deprecation means that Google won’t be internally looking at the label for enforcing its policies around Restricted Drug Terms. In summary, the update means advertisers will simply no longer need to use the “Restricted Medical Content” label on their ads targeting these prescription keywords. Instead, Google will now use its certification system to allow advertisers to target prescription drug keywords.

What is Google Ads’ Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification?

In July 2025, Google launched a new certification application for advertisers in Canada, as well as the United States and New Zealand, who plan to use Google’s personalized targeting tools to advertise products or services that contain Restricted Drug Terms. Restricted Drug Terms are defined by Google as “prescription medications and information about prescription medications” excluding those that are not prone to abuse/misuse or are strictly for animals. These, by law, cannot normally be generally advertised for personal use. However, prescription medications can be advertised to healthcare professionals in their capacity as medical professionals.

This is where Google Ads’ personalization is potent, since it allows advertisers of these Restricted Drug Terms to specifically target medical professionals. Previously, Google relied on the label to enforce these restrictions. Instead, advertisers will now need to apply and obtain the Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification. Once received, they can begin running campaigns with Restricted Drug Terms targeted at medical professionals.

Who is Affected by the Changes to Google Ads Medical and Healthcare policies?

The simple answer is anyone targeting restricted drug keywords, i.e. prescription drugs, on Google Ads is affected by the July and August updates. They need to apply for the certification whether they already have campaigns running on the platform or plan to in the coming months. It is best to apply as soon as possible to avoid any disruptions or delays in advertising campaigns on Google. Your marketing agency, like Rosewood Marketing, can apply on your behalf, but they will need a letter authorizing the application. This letter follows a specific format set by Google. Be sure to provide your marketing agency with this letter so that they can apply on your behalf and continue to manage and run your campaigns.

Staying Updated with Google Ads

Now you should have a better idea of the recent changes by Google Ads in its Healthcare and Medicines policy. As mentioned, we recommend applying for the Restricted Drug Term Personalization Certification as soon as possible or providing us with the letter so that we can apply on your behalf. If you’re interested in starting new Google Ads campaigns in this industry, contact our Google ads team, who will be more than happy to lend their expertise.

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Time to Talk Tracking: Is Your Website Measuring What Really Matters?

A woman on a laptop with Google Analytics looking at the various metrics a business' website is measuring.

A business’ website does more than provide information to visitors. It also offers a lot of valuable information about these visitors to the business. This can include users’ interests, preferences, and certain demographics, but often that valuable data is missed or even ignored. It’s time to talk about website tracking. We’ll explain which website metrics are important, why they are insightful, and some of the best tools for gathering and measuring that information.

Why Website Metrics are Important to Track

Websites can collect a lot of data about how many visitors come to a website, from where, what pages they visit, how long they stay, and more. These can be extremely informative for a business. They can provide insights into customer/client interests, how they are navigating to your website, whether an audience is growing or cycling, and even strengths or weaknesses about the website design itself. Measuring these important metrics can provide great insight about your website’s design, the products/services you offer, and where you should focus digital marketing efforts.

Important Website Metrics to Measure

There are countless data points a website can measure, but they are not all created equal. Some are more important to measure and track than others. For example, ‘views’ is a simple metric to see how many people are viewing a business’ website and specific pages. However, it’s not much more informative than this. We’ll explain some of the key measurements that all businesses should be tracking.

Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is uniformly one of the most important metrics to track on a website to measure engagement. It considers what percentage of visitors to a business’ website convert, i.e. perform some kind of action. There are different kinds of conversions and yours will depend on the website and business. Conversion rate may consider completing purchases or booking appointments/service, but they can also be filling in a digital form, signing up to a newsletter or trial, or downloading content. All of these can be extremely informative about what is attracting visitors’ attentions and interests.

Event Tracking and Other Behaviour Measurements

Another important metric for measuring website visitor engagement is event tracking. Events can include conversions, but they also include other actions taken on a website. Event tracking can monitor users clicking on certain buttons or images, playing videos, opening a gallery, etc. All of this can provide important data for what parts of a website are attracting more attention, getting more conversions, and more. That can help a business know where to focus its service/product offerings and inform web designers about future revisions to the site’s layout.

Other event related metrics like average time per page (how long users are staying on pages) and average session length (how long users are staying on the website) can also be extremely informative both to a business and designers. For example, visitors may be staying on a page for a long time because of strong interest, but if it is a page designed to quickly redirect users to more specific products or pages, it may be due to confusion or too many options.

Traffic Sources

Today, most people don’t navigate to a new website by typing the URL into their browser’s address bar. Instead, most people are directed to a website from ads, social media, emails, blogs or even other websites. Measuring a website’s traffic’s sources helps determine where new and returning visitors are coming from, helping to determine which marketing is most effective and where a business can maintain and further grow its clientele. Inversely, it can also identify which channels might be lacking and if you need new marketing strategies.

Bounce Rate vs Engagement Rate

Another informative metric to measure and track is the bounce rate. This tracks how many visitors load a page on the website and then leave without clicking or interacting with anything on the site. This can indicate certain design elements are not grabbing attention or perhaps a certain page is causing more bounces than others.

Engagement Rate is the opposite of a bounce rate and a good measurement to compare with the bounce rate. The engagement rate tracks how many visit the website and interact with anything, including buttons, images, videos, etc. With the engagement and bounce rates together, a business can get a full sense of the impression its website provides.

Tools for Measuring your Website

All these metrics are important to track, but that may leave the question of how you measure them. Of course, there are countless tools and plug-ins available to help you track metrics. We’ll highlight a few standards.

Shopify Analytics

Shopify includes in its platform a dashboard which helps track various metrics about an ecommerce website. Along with some of the essential metrics we’ve mentioned, it also includes various business performance metrics that can help track both your website and ecommerce business.

MonsterInsights

WordPress does not offer a free built-in analytic dashboard like Shopify, but it does have a large suite of plug-ins. MonsterInsights is one of the more robust plug-ins and offers a wide range of tracking for a website along with Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

Of course, the web giant Google provides its own web analytics platform that can track and measure a website’s various metrics. Google Analytics, part of Google’s large Marketing Platform, provides all these key metrics and also connects to other Google services, for an even fuller picture of all your digital marketing. Its services are also built into WordPress’ Premium plan, and Shopify sites can be connected to the platform.

Matomo

Another popular web analytics platform is Matomo. Along with a thorough set of analytics, Matomo is particularly popular for its data ownership policy and self-hosting option, allowing a business to keep the metric tracking in-house. Its WordPress plugin can make it an easy addition to any WordPress site.

Making Sense of the Metrics

Tracking and measuring key metrics of your website can be extremely informative. A key thing to remember when tracking these metrics is that they are numbers alone. Measurements mean nothing without careful analysis. For example, a click-rate could be high or low for various reasons. The metrics become even more informative when they are combined, e.g. observing that traffic coming from a certain source has higher engagement rates. Your web design and digital marketing team at Rosewood will have the expertise to identify the important metrics, understand what they mean, and turn them into actionable strategies for your business. If you’re ready to start tracking measurements and consider the invaluable data of your business’ website, contact Rosewood’s web team.

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