The holiday season is almost upon us! Are you ready for one of the busiest shopping seasons of the year? It’s time to start reviewing your campaigns, keywords, and ad messaging!
I’m here to help you make the coming holidays your most successful yet! In this post I’ll cover several checkpoints to ensure your sem campaigns are holiday ready.
But First: In House or eCommerce Manager
If you are doing your search marketing inhouse, you’ll most likely have a better understanding of your campaigns and easily be able to evaluate them against the preparation list below.
Do you have an eCommerce Manager? I’d ask them if they are optimizing all elements of your holiday campaigns and setting campaigns for success. If you’re using an agency, double check that they have these areas fully covered.
Not doing your own search marketing or have a question? Send us a message, we can help you get more revenue this holiday season: hello @ demacmedia.com
1. Quality Score
The base of every PPC campaign is the quality score. Google compares it to the warning light in a car’s engine. It shows how healthy your ads and keywords are. The overall quality score performance of the account will tell us if search campaigns have been set up correctly to target the most relevant users. It varied between 1 – 10, 1 being worst and 10 being best. It is based on the combination of your campaigns (keyword and ad copy) and landing page relevance.
You would want to make sure that your account quality score is closer to 10. It will tell you how relevant your ads are to a user’s query, and how much you are going to pay. Google rewards retailers for being more relevant, and they also will penalize you for a least relevant score!
2. Keyword Bidding
Bid management is the most essential part of any paid search campaign. It should be different based on type of campaign (Brand, Generic, and Conquest), performance, and keyword intent (purchase or research).
Always differentiate your keywords and set bid strategies accordingly. Make sure that keywords that are below first page bid and have good QS are given chance to perform with a boost to show up on first page.
Check on keywords that convert well, but are capped by bid and low impression share. These will lose out due to ad rank. Bid adjustments should also be made based on hour of the day and geo location.
Retailers and marketers should make sure they are aware of high and low search trends during the day and which part of the country, city, and neighbourhood have your most profitable users. Be open and willing spend little more to get their conversion.
3. Ad Messaging And Landing Page
Always have multiple ads in your ad group. A/B test them to find which resonates well with users, and have ad messaging that is most apt for holiday season! Remember, get consumer’s attention with special offers. For example: expedited shipping or delivery in 1 business day.
Create a path to purchase that is as short as possible. Product search queries should be driven to the product page, and not the homepage. You will not only see a higher conversion rate, but it will also increase your landing page relevancy and quality score. It will also decrease your Cost Per Click (CPC) and increase Click-Through Rate (CTR).
4.Keyword Optimization And Traffic Direction
Regularly do keyword research to get new ideas and suggestions from search terms based on performance data, like conversions and CTR. This will also help in finding and blocking irrelevant search queries, that trigger ads but are not relevant to the campaign. Add these terms to your negative keyword list.
Always make sure that there are no duplicate keywords with same match type in the account! The last thing you want to do is cannibalize your account by bidding against yourself and dividing the traffic. During this time, I’d review your one word keywords. They should be bringing in relevant traffic.
Direct your traffic strategically by adding one campaign negative in other campaign. Warning, some search terms look relevant because they are already added as keywords in ad groups but Google has not always used those keywords when a user searched. Adding these search terms as negative exact matches will force AdWords to show the ads you want, rather than the ones that rank higher but are probably less relevant.
5.Merchant Feed And Shopping Campaigns
Check your campaigns, so that they in-sync with the merchant feed. You need to have the most updated information, so that consumers aren’t driven to an “out of stock” page.
Remember to update bids for products based on their performance and avg. sale value. Differentiate between the high priority and low priority, so that Google can optimize campaign accordingly.
6. Bing Ads
I knooooow. We all love Google, but you have to remember that 15% of users are using Bing. These shoppers are demographically more mature and fall under high income bracket.This is good news for any retailer or advertiser.
These users are 23% more likely to make a purchase than a user on Google. Always have your brand campaigns added on Bing as well. In doing so you’ll be protecting yourself and sales to your brand.
7. Optimize Budgets
Look out for campaigns that are constantly limited by budget but have performed well with ROI. Apply shared budgets to a bunch of low-converting campaigns and assign them the maximum budget you would like to spend.
Have a bidding strategy that sets them to reach maximum potential with that budget. Google will optimize, and drive money towards high performing campaigns.
Set it and Forget it!
Okay not quite that easy, but hopefully if you’ve reviewed your holiday campaigns using my tips you should feel more prepared going into the holiday season. If you have questions or need help, give our team a call: 1-888-860-0364
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