Personally, I don’t understand the people who consider Labor Day weekend to be the start of the Holiday shopping season, but they most certainly are out there -- my sister-in-law is one of them. She starts thinking about the Holidays right after Memorial Day weekend, carefully adding to her shopping list of possible gifts as she thinks about them throughout the summer months so that she’s ready to go once Labor Day weekend hits. It’s a level of Holiday Season anticipation that I’ve never encountered before, not even when I was a Santa-loving child myself. This is also the sister-in-law that, when I was just dating my husband and we spent Christmas Eve at his parents’ house, woke us all up at 5am to start opening presents... even though she’d kept us up until 1am watching “A Christmas Story” over and over again on Christmas Eve. Did I mention she’s 34 years old?
Anyway, holiday-happy relatives aside, the point of this post is to urge you, dear advertiser, to make sure your PPC campaigns are firing all cylinders for the trickle of holiday traffic that begins now and grows to a fever pitch as the month of December approaches. I just did a quick check on the “Research” tab in adCenter for the keyphrase “christmas gift ideas” and found there were 241 searches on these terms last month, as well as some historical data that shows over 1,000 searches on this phrase during September of last year, peaking at 11,802 searches during the month of November. December was only slightly lower at 11,369 searches.
Here are 6 tips to help you make the most of your online advertising efforts this year:
1.) Create new SEM campaigns specifically for the Holiday Season
Rather than going through your current campaigns to add keywords and ads with holiday-specific content, it’s far easier and more efficient to create holiday-specific campaigns that you can activate just for the holiday season, and then pause once the holidays are over. You can re-use these campaigns year after year, saving yourself a lot of time and effort in uploading specialized content, only to delete it all once the holidays are over. For more information on setting up holiday-specific campaigns, you can look over my previous post on creating specific campaigns for Mother’s Day that explains the concept in greater detail.
2.) Make sure your budgets are large enough to keep your campaigns live
The Holiday Season is infamous for gobbling up your advertising dollars quicker than any other time of year -- you don’t want to check in on your campaigns and find that they went into budget pause either early in the day for campaigns set to divide across the month, or else near the end of the month for those set to spend until depleted.
3.) Set aggressive bids
The largest budget in the world isn’t going to do you any good if your bids are set too low for the keywords you’ve selected. Increased competition for popular keywords and holiday-specific terms tends to drive bids higher during this time of year. I would be remiss in my duties as an SEM professional if I didn’t take this opportunity to direct you to the adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel 2007 to help you estimate what competitive bids should be. Yes, it does require Excel 2007, but there is a free 60-day trial version available for you to test drive (and use the Add-in with).
4.) Expand your keyword list
Building on the current theme, all the money in the world allocated to your SEM campaign isn’t going to bring in any business if you don’t have a wealth of relevant keywords to help trigger your ads. You may think that you’ve exhausted every keyword possible by wracking your brain for ideas related to your products and services, but chances are there are some you’ve overlooked. I can’t stress enough how useful the Add-in is for building your keyword lists, but if you’d like a quick fix view of potential terms, you can always enter in some key phrases on the “Research” tab in adCenter. You may also want to explore some of the keyword generation features on the adLabs site.
5.) Offer Holiday Season Perks
Ad copy that features eye-catching offers like “free shipping”, “overnight delivery” and “free gift wrapping” will entice buyers to click on your ads. Just make sure that the landing pages in your campaign validate this claim somewhere on the page or else you may run into editorial disapprovals. For more tips on ensuring your ad copy is optimized for top performance, you can refer to Shefali Singla’s post, Constructing an Effective Call to Action for Your Ad Copy.
6.) Use Dynamic Text in Your Ad Titles
Coupling holiday offers in your ad text with dynamic keyword insertion for your ad titles makes it so shoppers who see your ads will not only see ad titles matching the keywords they searched on (increasing the likelihood that they’ll click on them), they’ll also see all the cool things you’ll do for them in appreciation for giving you their business. If you do opt for utilizing dynamic insertion, be sure to upload the keywords for your new Holiday campaign as you would want them to appear in your ad title, i.e. with the first letter of each word capitalized. For more information, you can read more about this in my previous post, Tips to make sure your dynamic ads appear as capitalized in adCenter.
If you have any questions or comments, please visit the adCenter Forum. The forum is a great way to connect with other PPC marketers, as well as to give feedback and offer suggestions on what you'd like to see in future adCenter releases. Microsoft employees monitor the posts in the forums daily, so you can be sure that your questions will be answered.
Good luck!
Tina Kelleher
Microsoft adCenter Media Specialist