Tips For Planning PPC Campaigns During Peak Periods

The importance of a detailed plan of action for your PPC campaigns ahead of a peak period for a business or market cannot be ignored. With almost every market becoming more expensive and the opportunity to implement cutting edge innovations to stand out widening, it is more important than ever to plan your activity. 

Below are some of the key steps to setting a solid foundation for a successful period activity for your PPC campaigns.

Understand key dates and times for search demand

A flat budget spread evenly across a month can commonly result in PPC advertisers missing out on key spikes in demand. Failure to research key weeks, days and even hours can result in an advertiser missing out on the biggest opportunities to drive sale/leads and falling behind the competition.

Research into key periods for your market can be done using past data from your PPC campaigns or using Google insight such as the Google trends tool. Weighting investment to capture demand ahead of the rest of the competition can potentially lead to significant gains in terms of traffic and conversions at a lower cost.

Keyword Research

Keyword Analysis and Research are key to ensuring you have coverage across all the keywords that are going to help meet your targets.

Analyse recent keyword performance to ensure that all top performing terms are in positions to drive volume ahead of any key periods for the business.  Also look back at the same period last year to ensure that you are not in low positions on any terms that typically trend during the upcoming period.

Research the market and lean on suppliers to provide detail on anything outside your existing PPC campaigns that is currently trending or expected to be big in the upcoming period. Being proactive and ahead of the curve is key to being in less competitive auctions and paying less for your PPC activity.

Using PPC campaigns to Support your awareness driving channels

Brand activity is the clear opportunity here and for advertisers that run this as part of their BAU strategy, ads should highlight key offers and align with the message that has driven searchers to look for the brand online.

If you don’t run PPC brand activity, then consider using it tactically to support any awareness channels and assist in ensuring none of the competitor set are profiting from any of your activity.

Search data analysis shows a direct correlation between awareness driving activity and non branded search demand with some consumers reacting by becoming in market for the product/service being advertised and not just the brand. To take supporting awareness channels a step further – it is now possible to use AdWords scripts to automatically support this activity from a non brand bidding perspective to fully align your PPC campaigns.

Create a sophisticated audience strategy

During a period where traffic to site is likely to be at it’s highest point of the year, utilising search remarketing is key to ensuring that you are visible in front of your most valuable prospects.

• Create lists that account for a potential change in research periods and path to conversion lengths.
• Ensure the appropriate bid increases are in place across audiences on existing keywords.
• Look at opportunities to tailor ad copy on existing keywords based on specific users past behaviour on site – i.e. Previous Converters, Basket Abandoners.
• If you know a specific audience is particularly valuable to your business then look at opening up your keyword list, focussing on broader generic terms that would typically be inefficient.
• If you are in a high volume, versatile market then Google Analytics can be used to group your remarketing lists into custom audience profiles.

Prioritising these prospects has proven to help advertisers meet KPIs, grow activity and improve efficiency within their PPC campaigns.

Consider overall SEM performance

During a period where investment is high and CPCs are likely to be inflated, consider opportunities to cut back spend within PPC campaigns where natural search click share is already hitting share targets.

Cutting back in these areas can allow you to then focus on driving paid investment in areas where there is little traffic coming through natural search with an overarching view of increasing SEM growth and profitability.

These tactical PPC initiatives help lay the foundations but it is the sophisticated optimisation, care and attention from the experts at Clickoo that bring a PPC strategy to life.