web123 6 tips for maximizing your holiday ppc ad performance 10132011
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6 Tips for Maximizing Your Holiday PPC Ad Performance Strategies for staying one step ahead of the rest
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Housekeeping Items
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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1 Why is PPC important for the Holidays? Online retail sales exceeded $1 billion on Black Friday through Cyber
Monday in 2010
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Nov/Dec holiday season generated $32.6 billion in retail ecommerce
• Creates unique position for B2B new year spending
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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2 What is the Right Timing?
Retail
• Be ready for the Thanksgiving & Cyber Monday shopping rush
Know your audience
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2 What is the Right Timing?
Retail
• Plan for spikes all the way up to the weekend before Christmas
Know your audience
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2 What is the Right Timing?
Travel
• Last-minute travel
Know your audience
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Shop.org’s eHoliday study:
• 40% of retailers plan to have their holiday ads up by Halloween
• Another 40% plan to be up in the first week of November
2 What is the Right Timing? Plan ahead!
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• Be sure to maintain your presence on Christmas and through New Years
• More than 2/3 of consumers say they will be giving a gift card as a present
2 What is the Right Timing? Maintain active presence at the apex of the buying season
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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Do:
• Optimize landing pages for a better user experience
• Optimize for quality score to ensure the highest efficiency in your campaigns
• Plan your ad copy and landing page tests
3 Landing Page Copy Best Practices Correlation between copy quality and copy effectiveness
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3 How Can You Compete Effectively?
• Regular competitors will get
more aggressive
• New competitors will appear
in the auction
• Increased pressure in the
auction will cause CPCs to
increase
• Increased CPCs will drive up
costs that are already
impacted by additional volume
Be aware of your competitors and their strategies
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3 How Can You Compete Effectively?
• Keep quality score high to increase efficiency
• Watch you minimum bids, don’t get knocked off the first page
Be aware of your competitors and their strategies
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3 How Can You Compete Effectively?
• If a competitor is going to launch a new online marketing initiative, it is most likely to happen with the new year
• Plan ahead and capitalize on the opportunity for strong new leads
B2B businesses will see similar behaviors in early Q1
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3 How Can You Compete Effectively?
What offers are they running?
• Check their search and
banner ads
• Look at their websites and landing pages
• Be sure your unique value is truly unique
Keep an eye on your competition and differentiate yourself
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3 Offers & Sales Tips for Retail
• Simplify your promotion
• Avoid complicated promotions that don’t add value
• Consider promotions of convenience over promises of cash
• Last minute express shipping can have far more value than a rebate
Be clear and concise in your offer
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3 Offers & Sales Tips for Retail
• Gift cards are a great way to guarantee a later sale and savior to the late shopper
• Donating a dollar to your favorite charity for every x dollars spent is a great way to give back while involving the customer
Be creative and unique in your offer
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3 Offers & Sales Tips for B2B
• Make whitepapers and promotional videos easily accessible on your site
• Call out free trials & downloads or online demos
• Test new promotions to find what resonates with your audience
In January, prepare for new customers with new budgets looking for
new business solutions
Courtesy of HubSpot
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3 Offers & Sales Tips in Social Media
• Start the conversation with your customers at the research portion of the funnel
• Anticipate comparison shopping
Refine your social media strategies and social PPC ads
Courtesy of Wildfire app
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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4 Landing Page Best Practices
Attract attention with a gift finder landing page
• Be clear with your
shipping deadlines
• Make the experience as
painless as possible
• Make sure your offers
and promotions are clear
and prominent
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4 Ad Copy Best Practices
• Keep ads up to date and relevant
• Be clear when reflecting your offers
• Don’t try to fit too much information into one ad
• Differentiate from your competitors
Appeal to the holiday intent of your users
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4 Keyword Best Practices
• Separate branded and terms from your generic terms
Keep specific holiday terms separate from your regular keywords
Generic Branded
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4 Keyword Best Practices
• Check query reports often to ensure that you are not wasting precious budget on unqualified traffic
• A good negative keyword strategy can save thousands of dollars!
Regularly update your negative keywords
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4 Keyword Best Practices
• Check historical KW reports to see where you should increase or decrease bids
• Utilize search query reports for keyword expansion and negative keywords
• Google Trends to gauge seasonal lifts rends
• Google Insights for Search to inform geo-targeting
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4 Budgeting Using Website Analytics Step One: Expand view to a full year of accurate visitor data
• Look for seasonal trends
• Inspect what you expect
Method adopted from: http://searchengineland.com/how-analytics-can-help-
balance-your-annual-search-advertising-budget-90723
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4 Budgeting Using Website Analytics Step Two: Export data into spreadsheet
Method adopted from: http://searchengineland.com/how-analytics-can-help-
balance-your-annual-search-advertising-budget-90723
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4 Budgeting Using Website Analytics Step Two: Export data into spreadsheet
Method adopted from: http://searchengineland.com/how-analytics-can-help-
balance-your-annual-search-advertising-budget-90723
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4 Budgeting Using Website Analytics Step Two: Export data into spreadsheet
Method adopted from: http://searchengineland.com/how-analytics-can-help-
balance-your-annual-search-advertising-budget-90723
Visits from Specific Month
Total Visits for Year
Total Yearly PPC Budget
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4 Budgeting Using Website Analytics Step Two: Export data into spreadsheet
Method adopted from: http://searchengineland.com/how-analytics-can-help-
balance-your-annual-search-advertising-budget-90723
Adjusted PPC budget for
specific month
Visits from Specific Month
Total Visits for Year
Total Yearly
PPC Budget
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1 Why is PPC Important for the Holidays? Take advantage of the season for the height of retail spending
2 What is the Right Timing? Understand your target audience for B2B and B2C sales
3 How Can You Compete Effectively? Optimize your B2B or B2C offers against your competition
4 How Will You Optimize Keywords & Landing Pages? Be clear with your product offers, shipping timing, and pricing to boost incentive
5 How Should You Manage The Budget? Monitor bid management and campaign optimization for best results
Webinar Agenda
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@bradleywjoe
5 Budget Management
• Daily budget caps are a safe guard against over-spending, not to be used for budget management
• Campaigns that reach their limit early in the day run the risk of losing impression and market share when not serving
Control your budget with bid management and campaign optimization
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• Don’t manage budgets by pausing high spending ads and keywords
• Pausing keywords can lead to missed conversions
• Conversion rates and quality scores are not affected by bidding to lower positions
• Quality of traffic is based on conversion rates, not volume
5 Tips for Seasonal Budget Management Best practices for budgeting for seasonality
Conversion
Rate
Conversions
Total Clicks
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Online attribution management tools can close the loop from first touch to closed deal
Allows for 360 tracking from initial keyword search to closed opportunity by uncovering
data from Analytics and CRM into unified view.
5 Tips for Seasonal Budget Management
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5 More Food for Thought…
Take advantage of ad scheduling to avoid late-night ad copy changes
• Put your ads live as soon as promotions start
• Leave them running until the last minute the offer is valid
• Avoid manual midnight updates
• Functionality is available from most publishers and 3rd party tracking solutions
Don’t leave holiday messaging running into spring or summer months
• This implies that your campaigns are out of date and that your site is not current or relevant
Thank You!
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