As we creep further in to quarter 4, we are fast approaching several key dates in the calendar including Halloween, Black Friday, and Christmas.
These events, and the many sales around them, make quarter 4 the highest trafficked and most profitable time of the year for a number of sectors. As a business, it is important that you give your PPC campaigns a bit of TLC to ensure you are reaping the rewards.
We’ve got some top tips to help you achieve more in Q4:
Save budget for November and December
If you have a strict budget, either monthly or yearly (or both), save some addition ad spend for the last two months. This is generally when traffic is at its highest, as people are preparing for Christmas and New Year.
That being said, it is worth taking a look at your average lead time. If your lead time averages at 1-2 months then you want to start your campaigns as early as possible, but if your lead time is a few days then you may be able to save your pennies a little longer.
Be strategic with mobile advertising
There is no doubt that mobile is continuing to see growth annually and you need to consider this when creating and optimising your campaigns.
Ensure that your site is well optimised for mobile, with responsive landing pages that will keep customers on your site. The checkout or enquiry process needs to be really simple and smooth on a mobile device to keep customers happy.
When looking at keywords, you may also want to consider bidding more for those on mobile, as they are more sought after. You have to scroll a lot further on mobile before you see organic results, and so being at the top of the page in either the shopping results or advert landscape can be a huge advantage.
Keyword research
This may seem like an obvious point to some seasoned PPC managers, but keyword research is a large part of having a successful campaign.
You will want to clean up your current keywords and separate them out into the right ad groups and campaigns. Take a look at your ads and figure out which you can change to include holiday-related keywords, such as “gift” or “festive”, in order to reach the right audience. It is also worth looking at growth areas of searched keywords such as ‘near me’ or using the term ‘for’ as people use this a lot when looking for items for a friend or loved one (i.e. Nike trainers for men/boyfriend etc.).
Using Google’s Keyword Planner is an effective way of checking which keywords you might want to be using.
Review previous campaigns
Take a look at campaigns that you ran in previous years and establish whether they were successful. Did they achieve what you were hoping and what made them effective or ineffective?
Were you successful with last year’s PPC campaigns? What improvements could you make and what worked well? By asking this you can start to establish what path to take in terms of budget, keywords, copy and timeline.
Using your data to look at last’s year conversion rate, ROI, and traffic will help determine which days and weeks were most profitable, as well as how to budget for the coming period.
To look a bit further in to how consumers think, it is worth looking at
Google Trends to establish when people’s interest in different periods peaks. In 2017 searches that were Christmas-related started rising in October and peaked in the final week running up to Christmas. In comparison, Halloween-related searches start to peak at the start of October and quickly drop off at the end of the month.
These tips are a great starting point to get your seasonal campaigns on the right track, pair these with automation on various platforms and the autumn and winter period will be a breeze.
For more advice and guidance on creating winning campaigns, get in touch
with one of the experts at AdPilot today.
