Having managed a large number of pay-per-click campaigns across different industries, we understand that seasonality has a great impact on certain sectors and should not be overlooked under any circumstances.
Here are some summer trends and tips that might help you improve your PPC performance this season. Even though these apply to specific sectors, they are likely to influence a wide range of businesses so keep your eyes peeled.
Last-Minute Travel & Internal Holidays
When looking at trends, travel is one of the most important verticals as the demand for holidays fluctuates massively throughout the year.
According a recent Criteo report1, mobile accounted for 28% of travel bookings in the UK in Q1 2016, so this trend with bookings taking place on mobile devices is expected to continue this summer, especially when it comes last-minute bookings.
Given that booking a holiday requires a high involvement decision, cross-device conversions are very likely to occur. In order to monitor your performance, is it recommended that you pay great attention when implementing conversion tracking, as a consistent number of booking decisions are influenced by multiple touchpoints.
There is no need to mention that people who go on holiday will usually buy a different range of items so retailers who operate in the Apparel & Accessories ( t-shirts, bikinis, sunglasses, etc.), Health & Personal Care (sun protection creams) or Beauty (water proof mascara) sectors will benefit as well if they understand seasonality and make use of their historical data.
Internal holidays & weekend breaks will be equally important as people who don’t go abroad will look for affordable getaways. Aside from the travel operators and hotels, Garden & Outdoors might see a surge in interest especially during the weekends or when the weather is favourable.
The Summer of Sports: UEFA EURO 2016, Wimbledon, British Grand Prix & The Rio 2016 Olympic Games
Sport is a topic that is going to influence almost every marketing decision this summer, not only because the audience of these events is huge, but also because they are likely to impact a wide range of businesses such as travel operators, retailers, pubs and restaurants.
Local pubs and restaurants will see an increase in their footfall during these events – so if you have a venue that is not in a central area, you might consider driving traffic to your store using location extensions.
According to Marketing Week2, 59% of the people will use a smartphone whilst watching the Olympics, so adjusting your mobile bids is a no-brainer when targeting this audience or anything similar. There is no need to mention that sport brands will have the biggest gains during these competitions, so if you are a sports retailer it’s time to update your PPC strategy.
Another interesting aspect that needs to be taken into account when targeting these sport audiences is gender. In order to understand you audience better we put together the gender distribution figures for the UK’s most popular sports:
- Football -33% Female vs. 67% Male
- Tennis -51% Female vs. 49% Male
- Athletics – 45% Female vs. 55% Male
- Cycling – 38% Female vs. 62% Male
Back to School
The new term is a huge event for both kids and their parents and even though school doesn’t start until September, the preparation for this starts well in advance – Google suggests that around 65% of the searches related to uniforms, stationery and other products in this category usually begin in mid/late July and peak at the end of August (Please see screenshot below).
Search queries related to school items are expected to grow by 19% this year, so optimising your PPC campaigns is highly recommended if you operate in this sector. Keep in mind that teenagers that make their own purchasing decisions are very likely to start their search journey on a mobile device, so updating your bids is essential.
Other business opportunities that might be considered:
- Electrical, decor and homeware items have usually seen a surge in interest when students go back to university.
- Small kitchen appliances might see a similar upward trend later this summer when students move back to the halls.
- Electronics, especially laptop sales are likely to go up from July onwards (Google Trends).
Whether or not your business operates in any of the above mentioned industries, seasonality will most probably affect your PPC performance, so understanding trends and historical data is crucial. As a dedicated PPC Agency, we are more than happy to help you manage your paid search campaigns, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a no obligation PPC review and consultation.
1Criteo Travel Flash Report: Get ready for a mobile summer, http://www.criteo.com/media/4290/travel-report-q2-2016-pdf.pdf
2How brands can target sports fans ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, https://www.marketingweek.com/2016/04/22/how-brands-can-take-advantage-of-sports-fans-ahead-of-the-rio-2016-olympic-games/
Written by Daniel Lupu PPC Analyst at Circus PPC Agency
Youtube Director Brings Video Ads to Small Businesses
YouTube has recently announced a new collection of tools to help small and medium-sized businesses shoot and edit video ads. YouTube Director is a free app that can currently be downloaded to any iOS device that gives the user the ability to create quality video ads on a budget.
Considering that some reports have suggested that ads on YouTube result in higher conversion rates than any other network, Youtube Director is a useful initiative that should see more small businesses take advantage of the platform. Youtube is an increasingly popular medium for targeting mobile users. As YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has noted, the video-streaming service now reaches more 18-49 year olds than any television network. The market is there for advertisers to take advantage of; however some small businesses have previously struggled to gather the resources and funds for a professional video campaign.
The Barber Shop Club in Los Angeles, California used Youtube Director to create their own video ad (see below). As a result, the video resulted in a 73% increase in ad recall and a 56% increase in brand awareness among their target audience.
Director onsite is also free for any business that commits to spending more than $150 on YouTube advertising. The service is currently only available in certain areas of the United States, although don’t be surprised if it moves into Europe at some point in the near future. The final new feature of Youtube Director is a new service for mobile apps. Youtube Director Automated Video uses existing content from your business, such as images and logos, and automatically generates an online video based on them.
So no matter what size your business is, there has never been a better time to add YouTube marketing to your PPC strategy.
Using Adwords Shared Budgets
The word ‘budget’ affects pretty much anything in life; your weekly shops, your household bills etc.
It’s the same scene with paid search or, indeed any marketing channel.
Budget is first and foremost the biggest factor when devising any marketing plan.
Let’s keep things relevant and concentrate on AdWords.
Google allows you some flexible options for managing budgets:
- Daily caps
- Automated rules
- Shared budgets
Traditionally when you are given a monthly budget to spend in AdWords you break that spend down into a spend-per-day (SPD), and distribute that SPD between the campaigns using budget caps. Ordinarily if you have one account with multiple campaigns this is the way to go as you will monitor the campaign performance and re-assign budgets based on performance – higher caps for the good performers, lower caps for the not-so-good performers and Don’t forget ad scheduling!
In this blog I would like to focus on shared budgets.
Shared budgets were introduced to help alleviate the complexities of multi-campaign budget management and ensures that any overspends are kept to am minimum. This can help when budgets are tight but you still want to implement complex strategies.
This was very important with a recent client of ours:
- One company specialising in one product
- Operates via franchises all over the UK
- Separate account for each franchise
- Individual monthly budgets for each franchise
- 25+ franchises at any given time
This gave us very complex account structures with very small budgets per location. We decided to use shared budgets so that we could spend the time expanding, expanding campaign structures & keyword lists but not be hindered by variances in individual campaign costs. It also made more sense as we are dealing with a single product. The only real variables are the locations which are a handful for each account and simply managed at campaign level.
By setting a shared budget across all campaigns we can avert any overspends for each location, but driving more clicks and a lower CPC overall.
To set up shared budgets you need to do the following:
- Open the account you want to set it up in
- Click on Shared library.
- Under Budgets click View>>
- Create a new budget by clicking the big red button that says + BUDGET
- First things first, give your budget a name (in the Budget name box) – It’s a good idea to name the budget by the actual amount you want to set (so if your daily budget is £6.50, name it £6.50 Per Day)
- Next, you want to select the campaigns that share this budget. So underneath Budget name box is the Apply to campaigns section, click the Edit link and a box will open up allowing you to select the campaigns. In this exercise we’re selecting all of them
- Then, set your daily budget amount in the final box at the bottom
- It’s up to you how you set the delivery but I believe if your campaign is running for most of the day you might want to choose evenly to start with
- When you’re all done, just click save
- Keep doing the same with each account until you’re finished
This will override your individual campaign settings for budget (of course) and delivery method. It won’t interfere with your ad rotation or targeting.
One thing to bear in mind is that you don’t have to do one or the other. In the same account you can have shared budget across some campaigns whilst maintaining individual caps for others.
This makes the bidding strategy more flexible.
If, you have an account with three campaigns (let’s call them 1, 2 and 3).
- The daily budget for the account is £35. You know Campaign 1 gets the highest number of sales, has the lowest cost per sale and never spends more than £25 per day.
- Campaigns 2 and 3 perform well but can outperform each other daily.
What you could do Campaigns 2 and 3 is share the remaining £10 between them so you’re not restricting individual performance by giving them each a £5 cap. Using a shared budget for these two means the can potentially get access to more budget if one is driving more traffic one day when the other isn’t and vice versa.
And just like all things in AdWords you will need to test to see what works best for you.
If you would like a helping hand with shared budgets or any other element of PPC advertising then please contact us for a free, no obligation PPC review and consultation with one of our PPC Experts.
Circus Win Google Ready To Rock Award
Circus PPC have won the latest Google Ready to Rock Award
In the First Award of its Kind, UK Based PPC Agency ‘Circus PPC’ wins over European & Middle East Competition
To be awarded any award is a great achievement but to be presented an award by Google is an honour not many agencies’ experience.
The Ready to Rock competition was an AdWords based competition open to all Google Partner Agencies across the whole EMEA. By analysing accounts, looking for technical excellence, growth and development, Circus PPC’s accounts were shown to be some of the best in Europe.
Circus PPC are at the forefront of new technologies, growing traffic & sales for our clients, developing some of the most advanced campaigns in Europe, we not only gained recognition for our hard work and diligence but helped grow our clients sales & revenues in the process too.
We are immensely proud of this accolade and will continue to work as hard as we do striving to drive excellence and performance in all that we do – Rick Tobin MD of Circus PPC
In typical lavish fashion, Google did have a very extravagant ceremony at the Motorwerks in Berlin. With live music, a lavish large size foosball table, dartboards, burger vans, drawing with fire and many other pieces of entertainment, we were spoiled on the night.
With agencies from all over Europe attending, we spoke about the markets in different countries as well as speaking to many people from the Google team.
Being the first of its kind and Circus being given Google Partners award on the night, it’s helped highlight the great work we have been doing. We hope to enter many more of these competitions and with hard work combined with our vast experience we hope to win many more!
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency
Five Optimisation Tips for Your Shopping Campaigns
As most advertisers know, Shopping Ads (also called Product Listing Ads or PLA’s) work incredibly well for e-commerce clients and given that they represent a consistent percentage of the AdWords traffic in some sectors such as retail, it is of uttermost importance to effectively optimise your campaigns in order to be competitive.
Below are five insider tips that are likely to improve your online sales and make your ROI go through the ceiling:
Optimise Your Product Feed
Instead of using keywords to determine how relevant a product is, Google follows a more SEO related approach when it comes to PLAs, so it is essential to have an up to date feed that includes the following attributes:
- Product ID
- Product title
- Product Description
- Image Attribute
- Google Product Category
- Pricing
- Availability
Well written Product Titles and Product Descriptions, including all the core keywords, brand names, sizes, colours etc.. will allow the spider to accurately match your products to searches. If you want to appear against searches for “Designer Radiators” make sure your Product Titles & Descriptions include the words “Designer Radiator”.
Advertisers that do not provide enough relevant information about their products will get limited exposure or even have items disapproved.
To provide an engaging experience for your customers, we also suggest using high definition images that match the exact characteristics of your products, such as colour or material. “Lifestyle” pictures can often work better than simple boring product images, but do make sure they are representative of the actual product.
Account Structure
Assuming you’ve managed to create a product feed, you now have to build your first Shopping campaign. Having a clear account structure in mind is essential as this will make your life easier when it comes to optimising your bids.
There are multiple ways of structuring a shopping account, but it is crucial that you experiment and find what works best for you. Some advertisers create a different campaign for each brand and then create multiple ad groups for each product category within that brand campaign. Additionally, you can go a step further and create different campaigns or ad group for your best selling products, price ranges or for seasonal items.
Use Merchant Promotions
As most of the nowadays industries are highly competitive, retailers need to make sure their products stand out. Using merchant promotions, advertisers will be able to show a “special offer” link along their Shopping ads that will be available on both desktop and mobile devices. Advertisers that started using merchant promotions have reported considerable increases in their ROI levels, so this is something that should not be overlooked.
To create a new promotion log into your Merchant Center account, go to the “Promotions” tab on the left-hand side, click the “+Promotion” button and follow the instructions.
Analyse Your Search Query Report
Even though your PLAs can’t be triggered by keyword targeting, knowing the most popular search queries will definitely provide some great insights for optimising your campaigns.
Supposing you are a fashion retailer that only sells ladies items, you might consider adding “mens” as a negative keyword in order to avoid irrelevant traffic.
What is more, you can use your search query report to optimise your Product Title Attributes. For example, if your product title is “Adidas T-Shirt – Red”, but your SQR shows a huge amount of searches for “Adidas Red T-Shirt” you might want to update your product title to match your potential customers’ search queries more closely.
Use Auction Insights to Monitor Competitors
Your product feed is up to date, you use merchant promotions, but your sales volume is not up to your expectations? Have you checked your auction insights data?
This report shows you how your impression share, average position or top of the page rate compare to those of your competitors’. After identifying how you stand against your competitors, you can increase or decrease your aggressiveness in order to achieve your desired outcomes.
To check your Auction Insights report, please follow the steps below:
- Go to the “Campaigns” or “Ad Groups” tab
- Select the campaign or the ad group for which you want to see the data
- Go to the “Details” button and click “Selected”.
Now that you have all these tips, it’s time you started optimising your shopping campaign. Don’t forget that what works best for one account may not work for others, so be flexible and test different strategies.
If you have any questions or need help with your shopping campaigns, don’t hesitate to get in touch our team of experts are ready to help.
Written by Daniel Lupu PPC Analyst at Circus PPC Agency
Callout and Review Extensions Arrive On Bing
Last week, Bing Ads rolled out two new extensions that have the potential to take your ad copy to the next level and boost your CTR. Although they have both been available through Google AdWords for a while now, Callout and Review Extensions are recent additions to the Bing Ad’s platform. Here is everything you need to know about how to set up Callout and Review Extensions on Bing:
Callout Extensions
As you may already know, Callout Extensions allow for additional “USP’s” to be included in search ads; directly below the main body of text. They allow for additional details about your service or product to be highlighted, allowing ad copy to expand beyond the standard 71-character text ad limitations.
Bing have provided the following information on Callout Extensions:
- A given ad will display up to four callouts, with a minimum of two required
- Callout Extensions will serve alongside your other ad extensions
- Callouts are not clickable, free to use, and should not duplicate information already present within an ad
- Each campaign and ad group can have up to 20 Callout Extensions associated with it.
How do I create a new Callout Extension?
- Click Campaignsat the top of the page.
- Click the Ad Extensions
- If not already selected, click Callout Extensionsand select Campaign or Ad group.
- Click Create ad extension.
- Select the campaign or ad group you want to add the extension to.
- Click Add new callout.
- Enter the callout text and click Save.
Tests on the efficacy of Callout Extensions on Google have consistently determined that Callout Extensions help to improve CTR and conversion rates, typically boosting CTR’s by 30% and Conversion Rates by another 20% (As corroborated by the likes of PPCHero). Let’s hope they have the same positive impact for our Bing accounts.
Review Extensions
Review extensions allow for the inclusion of positive reviews, awards or third-party rankings to your ad copy. These are highlighted in an additional line below the ad text.
Bing also provided the following information about Review Extensions:
- A given ad will display only one review
- Similar to callouts, reviews also serve alongside your other ad extensions
- The review text itself is not clickable, but clicks on the review source (which link to the page containing the review) are free!
- Reviews and their corresponding sources have specificeditorial guidelines
How do I create a new Review Extension?
- Click Campaignsat the top of the page.
- Click the Ad Extensions
- If not already selected, click Review Extensionsand select Campaign or Ad group.
- Click Create ad extension.
- Select the campaign or ad group you want to add the extension to.
- Click Add new review.
- Enter the Review Extension details and click Save.
Unfortunately, it does not appear that Bing will allow you to import your callout and review extensions from Google at the account level. Additionally, there is no Bing Editor support so far. If you want to add callout and review extensions across your Bing, at the moment they will have to be added manually. But if you are willing to take the time to include them, these ad extensions could be a fantastic tool for making your Bing ads stand out to customers.
Using Google Trends To Evaluate Keyword Seasonality
As any competent PPC manager knows, every business has seasonality.
I manage a number of client accounts, each specialising in different products and services including:
- Automotive
- Hair & Beauty
- Clothing & Fashion
- Landscape Gardening
- Wine Retail
They are all different business areas but the one thing they all have in common, is seasonality.
A powerful tool we use in helping to understand seasonality is Google Trends. This is your best friend when it comes to understanding seasonal peaks and troughs.
It’s an incredibly flexible tool, allowing you to investigate search terms, time ranges and locations.
Case in point:
One of the clients I manage stock a huge range of tanning lotion and tanning accelerator products. Looking at the trend data we see that most sales happen in May-July. Why? The sun is out, people are booking their great escapes.
So it would make perfect sense to focus on Sales / Offers in Spring & Summer when the search volumes are increasing, and to reduce activity when searches and sales drop off in Winter.
We use Google Trends to understand the historical search trends for our keywords, and we use that data to inform our strategies. We relay information to clients and work together developing the best strategies that take advantage of those trends.
Here’s the how to:
Go to https://www.google.co.uk/trends/
In the search bar at the top, start with what you want to find trend information on. Keep it simple by using a generic term as it will give you the best overall view. In this case we’re going to search for “tan accelerator”. You will be presented with this screen:
When the results show up we need to make some adjustments. For this exercise we will:
- Select UK rather than worldwide
- Select 2015
It should now look like this:
Next, we need to add in another time range, in this case 2014. Use the drop down next to “Compare” to select Time ranges.
You’ll now be able to add another time range. Click +Add time range and select 2014.
It should now look like this:
You can now see that search trends are consistent for both years which helps us decide our strategy for the rest of this year.
How does this benefit you as a PPC manager?
Foresight – Knowing what the market is like over the year per client, comparing it with previous years (my advice is, keep it simple for your client like above). Using this knowledge I can approach my client with the following ideas:
- Consider pushing harder on tanning products between May & July
- Reduce aggression on tanning products from September until May the next year, maybe even pause PPC activity on these products over Winter
Another thing to consider is NOT to have a sale on tanning products in Autumn/Winter as customers might simply stock up for Spring and Summer, jeopardising peak sales opportunities.
Pay attention to the “Related searches” section at the bottom as this might give you more keyword ideas. For example “sunbed” would be a useful negative keyword.
Google Trends doesn’t just tell you the peaks & troughs of a certain business. It helps you understand why this happens too.
Consider this:
One of my clients supplies cake decorating tools and ingredients. Looking at Google Trend data they saw a massive surge in popularity from 2012. Why would this be? Me being a cooking & baking enthusiast (yes I am very domesticated!) two names spring to mind, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. They have been centre-stage on our screens as both the judges on The Great British Bake Off and presenters of their own baking shows.
That’s why it’s called Google Trends!
Common sense is a key factor too:
- Would you buy tanning lotion when it’s dark, wet and gloomy?
- Would it be wise pushing cake decorating equipment & ingredients a month before Christmas?
Using a combination of this superb tool, common sense, knowledge & enthusiasm for your client and their business, you can present them with some great opportunities to help their PPC really perform!
Don’t just manage bids and create new ads, help your clients come up with the ideas. Show your clients you’re working for them.
Are Your Day Parting & Ad Scheduling Strategies Updated?
What is day parting & ad scheduling?
Although Google call it ad scheduling, throughout the industry it’s better known as day parting. Day Parting is when you pick and choose the days and hours you show ads to your customers (You part the days into active and inactive zones).
This can be influenced by many factors:
- Opening hours
- Performance
- Specific promotions
- Event based strategy
Running ads only when offices are open or when results are expected. Evaluating performance by day or hour can deliver a huge competitive advantage.
On our client accounts we use AdWords, Analytics & Bing data combined to create daily and hourly performance maps, highlighting when performance is strong or weak and use that to influence strategy.
In this example you can see times of the day when an account has been slowed down and when aggression is normal. This is a very basic day parting strategy for an account which performs better in the evening than the day. Some of the times are given on the right hand side.
A more complex strategy may look like this weekend strategy for a retail client:
Why is a day parting strategy important?
Some reasons have been mentioned above regarding the opening hours; which would apply to websites driving phone calls (call centre opening times) or some retail clients trying to drive traffic during specific hours.
Promotions and event based strategies are short term strategies to be applied around an event or a promotion. For example, you may be running a specific offer for a few hours only; or you may need to sell some more tickets for an event which is in a few days after which the campaign needs to be off.
Performance however is usually the biggest factor. Poorer performing times and days can be wasting a lot of your budget and eat into the traffic for better performing times. This will generally help improve the account performance overall.
Conversion rate is one of the biggest influencers informing you of the best performing times of the day, however number of impressions, conversions and conversion value (if it applies) are something to keep an eye on. Conversion rate (for those of you who may not know) is the number of conversions divided by the number of clicks.
An example of conversion rate by hour is provided below:
A Few Things to consider:
There are a few things you do need to consider when applying ad scheduling strategies:
- You can only have 6 day parts on a day, so in the example data above, you cannot have a strategy by hour for each day, you need to group these into 6 segments of times.
- What works for 1 account will not necessarily work for another (even though it may be in the same industry).
- Conversion rate needs to be looked at alongside your other figures as well and not in isolation
- What works on Google may not necessarily work for Bing
- Brand campaigns: you may want to avoid applying day parting strategies on brand campaigns.
- Not every campaign will work in exactly the same way. For example, a retailer like Next, who sell a huge variety of items will find different products or types of products need different day parting. Some questions you may ask are:
- Do male and female products convert at the same time?
- What about home and furniture products?
- Do we need to consider e-shots as well?
- Seasonal day parting strategies (I have gone into detail in a separate section below)
- Shopping campaigns strategies vs text ads strategies
- Mobile day parting strategies: With mobile user patterns being different this is a piece of analysis to always look at. Whilst this cannot be done in the generic AdWords interface, it is something that can be achieved using automated rules on Adwords. I do expect Google to have this option available however at some point in the future.
- Data is key for applying day parting. Ensure you have enough data and do not base your whole strategy on a very small amount of data.
Hugely Important are the Seasonal ad scheduling strategies
Many people set up a strategy which they run with throughout the whole year. Whilst this may work for some industries, for most industries where there are large seasonal influences this will not. Below is a perfect example of a client whose strategy needs to be updated by season:
Whilst certain patterns are consistent like Saturday being the best performing day across all seasons, there are quite a few which are not. Two points to be highlighted are:
- In the spring, Wednesday is the worst day, whilst in the summer Sunday is. For autumn this is Wednesday and for the winter it is Monday.
- Whilst spring sees Friday being the 2nd strongest day, in the summer it is Monday.
It is obvious that having the same strategy across the year is a foolish idea.
How to update your ad scheduling strategy on Adwords
Here is a link to the help files that talk you through the update:
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2404244?hl=en-GB
Can you do this on Bing?
Of course you can. Bing used to have strict times in place for day parting rather than open time zones like Google has. However this has now changed. It is very important to understand your Bing customers however. You cannot always apply the same strategy to Bing as you have on Google. Your Bing customers are generally a different demographic which lead to differences in performance and differences in strategy.
Do you have a strategy in place and does it need to be reviewed?
If you would like one of our Experts to review your ad scheduling strategy or any other element of your PPC advertising then please do contact us.
Written by Ahmed Chopdat PPC Director at Circus PPC Agency
PPC Trends and Optimisation Tips for Easter 2016
With Easter around the corner, both retailers and PPC Marketers have already rolled up their sleeves in order to get their offers ready for the spring break. We had a look at some the sectors that had the highest popularity during the Easter period in the last few years and put together some optimisation tips that will improve your campaigns.
Home & Garden
Home & Garden has always been a popular category for this time of the year, so marketers should keep a close eye on the hottest topics within this category, which are:
- Home Improvement & DIY
- Home & Furniture
- Home Decor
- Outdoor & Garden
According to Google, Easter queries have seen a 19% YoY growth in 2015 with search volumes for Home Improvement and DIY ramping up in the two weeks leading up to Easter. Mobile plays a pivotal role in this category, with 60% of last year Easter searches occurring on a smartphone, so adjusting your mobile bids is highly recommended.
As more and more consumers turn to YouTube for ‘how to’ videos on DIY projects, it might be worth leveraging this opportunity by using TrueView ads for the products related to this category.
According to Google, the Mobile PLA traffic grew during Easter in 2015, so if you have any products in this category make sure your shopping product feed is up to date. Retailers should keep in mind that nice weather might urge consumers to go outdoors, so demand for sporting goods or other camping items might see a sudden surge.
Travel & Tourism
Travel is another sector that had an amazing YoY growth during this time in 2015, as people usually take advantage of the short spring break and decide to get away. As summer gets closer, consumers might also start planning their leisure trips, therefore, search queries for Cruises, Hotels & Vacation Packages have historically started climbing towards their summer peaks during this time of the year.
Mobile searches related to Travel & Tourism saw a 10% increase during Easter in 2015, so you might consider adjusting your bids to accommodate these trends. Also, make sure you add Easter specific keywords to your account in order to get more relevant traffic. If you are a tourism agency and have for example ‘city breaks’ as a keyword, adding ‘Easter city breaks’ might help you increase your CTR and drive more sales.
Remarketing represents another great opportunity for this industry as clients who switched from Static to Dynamic Remarketing saw their conversion rates skyrocketing and CPA’s reduced by 60%. For some great Remarketing strategies please follow this link.
I hope this article has given you some insights into the Easter seasonality and how to optimise your campaigns for the upcoming peaks. If you need any help with managing your PPC accounts, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Written By Daniel Lupu PPC Analyst at Circus PPC Agency
3 Simple Psychology Hacks to Improve Your Ads
Coming from a background in Psychology, it’s difficult to ignore the many areas where Psychology and Marketing meet – especially when it comes to creating ad copy that appeals to potential customers. One of the most important tasks of any marketer is to understand why people think and act the way they do; after all, if you know your audience, you know how to better target them. Luckily, you don’t need a degree to apply some basic principles to your account. Here are three quick and easy ways to enhance your ad copy with Psychology:
1. Use the principle of urgency to improve CTR
In sales, creating a sense of urgency in your customer is your friend. The anxiety that comes from urgency has been proven to lead people to think and act less rationally, which can be the difference between making that impulse purchase or not.
Implementing countdown timers in your ad copy is a quick way to create a sense of urgency in your customers. Use them and leave your customers feeling like they can’t afford to ignore your ad! Adding countdown timers to your ad copy is as easy as adding the following snippet to your headline or description lines: “{=“
After typing that simple code, the following box will pop up asking you to set the start and end date of your countdown. Your ad copy will then dynamically count down from your start date to end date. It’s that simple.
2. Use the isolation effect to stand out from your competitors
When you search for something online, have you ever noticed how similar the language is in every piece of ad copy? Doesn’t that make it so difficult for a single ad to stand out, no matter how eloquently it is written? The phenomenon of banner blindness has resulted in up to 86% of internet users ignoring banner ads. Although changes have made PPC adverts appear much more natural and organic in recent years, how can a marketer create ad copy that beats banner blindness?
The isolation effect predicts that people are much more likely to focus on and remember an item if it is substantially different from those around it.
In other words, the human mind is wired to spot the unusual and ignore the similar. When it comes to creating ad copy, it is easy to see what your competitors are doing and try to follow suit in the belief that if everyone else is doing it that way, it must be the best way! Next time, why not try creating ad copy that is completely different in tone, style and content to your competitors.
Use humour, creative adjectives, rhyme… anything you can think of to stand out and catch the viewer’s eye. A customer may just pay attention!
3. Exploit social validation to increase conversions
When it comes to shopping online, a major influence on purchases is the opinion of others. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, behind food and shelter, the need for belonging has the biggest influence on behaviour. Due to this, when it comes to making a decision, a person is much more likely to follow through if they have other people to validate that their decision is a good one.
One easy way to help validate potential customers is to include your business reviews to your ad copy through ad extensions. People are much more likely to trust the opinion of a fellow customer than a business. Because of this, positive reviews will help reassure the customers in their decision to trade with you, increasing the chances of them following through with their transaction.
If you own a Google Certified Shop, review extensions can be set up in minutes.
The next time you create your ad copy, make sure you think about the customer at the other side and not just the figures. Apply these principles and get into your customers heads – your conversion rate will thank you.