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PPC Tips for the Run up to Christmas

By Andrew Redfern @ 1st November 2010 4:44 pm PPC

While the basics of paid search behaviour and choice of keywords do not change throughout the run up to Christmas, the market conditions, however, vary by the way people buy, the way you sell and the way you compete.

Searches are more gift giving inclined, with increasing urgency as shipping deadlines get closer. As it is traditionally a heavily promotional time focusing on specific key dates – black Friday, cyber Monday and the increasing importance of shipping deadlines, sales and inventory levels vary significantly. As demand rises, competition heats up by existing competitors becoming more aggressive in their online marketing strategies and new competitors entering the market.

The chart below shows the volatile trends of the peak Christmas season last year (click on the graph for an enlarged version).

Peak Holiday PPC Seasons

The text ad is the first opportunity to answer to the searcher’s question, it must appeal to their gift giving intent, your promotions and distinguish itself from new and more agressive competition.

Alex Cohen, accomplished online marketer, blogger and presenter gives 3 tips to help increase click through rates and answer the most profitable holiday questions.

1. Segregate your brand keywords

Brand Keywords are unique, containing your brand name, they have high click through rates and low cost per click with high return on investment. Brand plus keywords contain your brand name and a category generic term. As there will be many brand plus terms, it is important to focus on the most profitable first for the Christmas period then to work through the rest in due time. The goal being to only attract brand plus queries, the last step to add your own brand terms as negative to any non brand campaigns

2. Manage your ads with ad parameters

The use of numbers in adverts, e.g. cost, inventory or discounts will help the ad to stand out against competitors, requiring a specific landing page which delivers the promise. You can add parameters to control changing figures for inventory stock or prices. The AdWords API blog has some good examples.

3. Query Mine for Winners

During the period leading up to Christmas, it is important to dig deeper into your search queries. People will search in new and different ways, especially as Google’s new ad format and Google instant have just launched and this is the first Christmas period that they will be used. It is important to focus on the highest volume/ cost terms and words that are converting profitably. These will separate out into unique ad groups with specific ad groups that address their intent.

Andy Donaldson (Hit Search Director) comments – ‘A Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can either make or break a business over this critical period for online retail. Adopting a Christmas PPC strategy focused on a scalable return on investment should be the least your agency is focused on over the next few weeks…’

To ensure success in the run up to Christmas, paid adverts are critical. The best text ads are crafted by focusing on the specific Christmas intent in each search query. Use brand terms to break out your ad groups. Get specific in text ads with numerical parameters and mine search queries to fine tune even more directly.

MND-HS-011110

Adapted from Alex Cohen’s “3 holiday PPC Tips for Black Friday (and beyond)” http://searchenginewatch.com/3641490

Hit Search PPC – 5 Strategic PPC Habits

By Andrew Redfern @ 6th January 2010 1:02 pm PPC

This is a guest post by Jerry McGovern, a content strategist for Acquisio, a company that develops enterprise level SEM software and PPC bid management solutions.

Running a PPC campaign is very dynamic experience. Not only are you trying to interact with users who might be interested in your offer, but you’re also bidding against countless competitors. No matter what software or tools you’re using to help manage your campaigns, it needs a human touch to navigate all those relationships. So you just have to get in their and get your hands dirty.
There are five habits that all good PPC managers share. Picking them up can bring down your CPC and conversion costs, and bring up your rankings.

Grow Your Keyword List

As your campaigns run, there’ll be plenty of data on medium- to long-tail keywords to help you find sources of traffic. In addition to creating new combos of existing, top-performing terms, there are two other ways to expand your list. You can (1) use third party tools such as Keyword Discovery or Google Keyword Tool, and (2) sift through your web logs and identify what users are using to navigate your site.
Similarly, you also want to balance new keyword additions with new negative match terms. Watch for when your ads are being shown for irrelevant search queries, and then add these queries as negative match keywords in your ad groups. It helps keep your conversion costs by sparing you un-targeted clicks.

Always Be Testing…

By testing new ads against your control ads, you can eliminate the poor performers. So always run more than one ad text at once within each ad group. Before you eliminate any keywords, though, double check the statistical significance of your data using a split ad testing tool.

You should also test new landing pages. One great tool for doing split A/B and multivariate testing on your landing pages is Google Website Optimizer. You can also use Google Analytcics to get data on bounce rates and page view times for each landing page.
Before pulling a landing page out of the rotation, though, make sure that the content of both landing page and ad text match one another. Users often immediately leave pages that don’t contain information similar to the ad they clicked on..

Keep a Campaign Diary

Trying to understand why clicks suddenly spiked? Or perhaps you recently introduced some new ad text but forgot when that was, or in what ad group. By keeping some kind of log, you’ll notice seasonal traffic trends, and avoid repeating past mistakes.
This is even more important if you’re advertising on several search publishers at a time. AdWords has the Change History Tool which allows you to see changes made to your account over time, but that doesn’t track your campaigns on Yahoo or Bing.

Watch Your Analytics

Google Analytics can clue you into things like why a conversion rate took a dive, whether the new landing page you’re testing is really any better than the old one. By examining bounce rates and average page view times and comparing them against paid traffic performance, you can get a glimpse into anything from the effectiveness of your landing pages to your shopping cart process. GA can also provide other helpful data such as geo-localization, funnel tracking, and site overlay.

Watch the Competition

If your competition suddenly starts outranking you on certain key terms, closely monitor your data over the next few days and take the necessary steps to adjust your ad ranking. First, in addition to increasing your bids, you might want to revise your ad text or add different new match types or variations to your ad groups.

It’s also possible that a competitor is featuring in a price-cut in the ad text – and it’s good to stay on top of these things. There are even a few paid monitoring services available to monitor the competition’s paid and natural rankings of competitors for you.

Clicks & Conversions

Winning the PPC auction without breaking the bank involves (1) bringing down your CPC down, and (2) increasing your ranking. If you’re managing multiple campaigns on multiple networks under multiple accounts, then you might need a bid management platform to tracking your CPC across all campaigns. But no automated tool can substitute from intelligent campaign management.

PPC software is great for doing the heavy lifting (like crunching a lot of numbers), but it takes an informed human being to get insight from all those numbers. By taking on the right habit, you can make sure that you cover all your bases, and (2) gain a better understanding of your market’s PPC landscape. And the better you know the terrain, the more easily you’ll be able navigate it.

Would you like to know more about these subjects? Contact Hit Search on 0845 643 9289. Remember, its a big world, make sure you become visible.

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