With just one month to go before Christmas Day, it’s soon become that time for many online marketers to dig out that winning Seasonal ad copy, or start bidding on those lucrative ‘Black Friday’ keywords. As with anything, careful competitor analysis and planning well ahead, will stand you in good stead and go some way to ensure that your holiday campaigns are profitable.
In this post, I’m going to give you some tips for running a profitable Paid Search campaign in your chosen niche, by following some tried and tested methods for ensuring your CPAs are as low as they should be, and your conversion rates soar during times of economic uncertainty:
1. Careful Keyword Research. By now most Internet Marketers are aware how valuable keyword research is to running a successful SEM or SEO campaign. But many choose not to invest much time in this crucial aspect, and end up paying high prices for keywords that don’t end up converting. So when carrying out keyword research it’s essential to a.) devote enough time to it b.) use more that one tool to get an aggregated search volume (bear in mind Google Adwords tool traffic estimator will be largely inaccurate for seasonality keywords as the data will be largely skewed to just a few months of the year)
2. Check out the competition. As equally important as careful keyword research, is competitor analysis. Try running a few searches on your main keywords and see what the competitors are using in their ad copies – what are their main highlight points (is it delivery time, discount offer highlighted or something else), what’s their call to action and are they directing searches to an appropriate landing page?
3. Target the undecided and consider your audience. When running your paid search campaigns you want to target people who haven’t made up their minds yet. Therefore, bidding on general keywords such as ‘personalised gifts’ might be an idea if the CPC are favourable. You should also make sure before crafting your ad copy you have considered your audience – what kind of language is appropriate, what will get their attention and come up with a catchy call to action to finish off.
4. Try something new. The content network can be a very lucrative and profitable network, especially around the holiday season time. However, just like anything it requires carefully strategical implementation, a lot of monitoring, analysis and tweaking to make sure it’s as profitable as possible. Keep an eye on your daily budget and adjust accordingly, and always check if your ads are on the right kind of websites that will be targeting your audience. Check for no impressions and no clicks on a regular basis, every 1 – 2 weeks.
5. Quality Control. Make sure your ads aren’t appearing for any keywords that could damage your brand image or keywords that you don’t want your ads to be associated with. Adding negative keywords on the adgroup and campaign level will ensure that your ads aren’t showing for the wrong kinds of keywords.
Sticking to the basics, but also trying something new and different will go a long way to ensuring your holiday campaign is a successful one!
