SEARCH PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING
There may be more than six but we’ve listed six different ways to capitalize your search PPC program during the Holidays and product seasonality.
1. Grab the Low-Hanging Keywords
Now that you know what’s popular during specific gifting seasons, if any of the popular categories correspond to your business, you can simply add the occasions as modifiers to your existing keywords.
If you’re selling on the keyword “video camera,” next spring you should try keywords like “video camera for graduate” or “video camera graduation sale.” It’s a volume opportunity for additional clicks, which often will come cheaper than your existing keywords.
2. Be Timely in Your Execution
If you’re a retailer of beauty and personal care products, for example, you’ll expect to see a major growth in gift-related search queries from October to November.
Try building a campaign to go live October 1, with ad copy and landing pages offering October incentives for the early birds looking to buy gifts for the year-end holiday rush. Well before the end of the month, you’ll have a sense of which ads work best, and when the next month begins, you can just swap the word “November” right into the creative.
3. Use PPC Ad Extensions to Your Advantage
In particular, two of Google AdWords’ extensions allow you to put some of these principles to work.
Site links give you the opportunity to drop additional inline links under the primary link in your ad. This way, at the time people are rushing to make a purchase, you can simultaneously inform them of coupons and rebates, complementary goods, and so forth. If certain site links start garnering a strong share of total clicks, then voila, now you know how to adapt ad copy and slant the deck more in their favor.
Seller ratings also speaks to the growing year-end demand for customer service solutions tied to people’s gift purchases. If you’re good enough to get four or five star average ratings, you’ll preemptively reinforce your image on the post-sales side of the equation. After all, search marketing is about more than just marketing – making your site visible via search engines is good customer service.
4. Diversify Your Digital Marketing Portfolio Beyond Just Search
Certain categories (e.g., luxury goods, apparel and clothing) experience a yearly decline in gift-related search activity leading up to the holidays. If you’re the type of advertiser that saves half your annual search marketing budget for the holiday season, now might be the time to rethink that strategy and perhaps invest in a more integrated approach.
Spending that money on a social media campaign during the spring/summer, for example, could drive a higher volume of branded search queries come November/December. This in turn can have a number of positive effects: lowering your aggregate search media costs, improving your conversion rates, and improving the revenue stream from supporting non-search channels.
5. Think Competitively
There is a notable first-mover’s advantage to investing in keywords before the rest of the competition catches on.
If your product category begins its holiday rise in October, why stop there? You’ll always have consumers who start their shopping a month or two (or more) earlier than that. And if you’re bidding on your competitors’ keywords, with ad copy that speaks to a forthcoming gifting occasion, you just might succeed in changing their minds and considering your product.
6. Remember the All-Important, Yearlong Gifting Occasions
These include birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, wedding showers, etc. If you take all your keywords, add the appropriate “gift” modifiers, and stash them in separate campaigns and ad groups, you can learn a thing or two by rotating unique ad copy and landing pages.
Your product might make a great birthday gift, but not so much for other occasions. Or you might find the optimal volume discount on party favors for a wedding shower.