Matt McGillicuddy, Head of Growth Marketing at Infinity, talks about how the implementation of call tracking can work alongside PPC to provide additional insights into user behaviour, and how this valuable information can be used to identify ways that the user journey can be better optimised, and customers better nurtured.
What is Call Tracking?
Call Tracking is a way to gain clarity over the online journey customers are taking prior to picking up the phone. This, in turn, helps businesses to make intentional rules and strategy updates to better identify high-intent customers, and approach and nurture them with this in mind.
How To Successfully Align PPC and Call Tracking
With call tracking, you get granular insights into which keywords and PPC ads are generating those all-important sales calls. With this intel, you can plough more resource into the activities you know will generate a return, and press pause on those that won’t, so your precious budget will work harder for you during this critical period.
You can take this a step further with a solution like Infinity’s Smart Match, which accurately links positive sales call outcomes to the PPC ads that drove them. Using this conversion data, you can guide the algorithm to get your top-performing ads in front of more customers that are likely to convert, guaranteeing a solid Black Friday return.
Find out more about how you can elevate and align your Black Friday PPC strategy here.
PPC and Call Tracking: Things To Consider
If we look at the Infinity Hub call data for the retail sector, there have been significant increases in call volumes over previous Black Friday periods with 2023 seeing a 41% increase in call volumes compared to the 2022 Black Friday period. What’s important to note is that, inevitably, not all these calls will be sales enquiries. Because Black Friday is so time-critical, you want to ensure agents are laser focused on converting callers to customers.
With call tracking, you have full visibility over the online journey customers are taking before they pick up the phone. With that intel, you can set up rules to identify the high-intent customers and push them to the top of the queue to complete their sale. On the flipside, you can also use call insight to identify friction points in the online journey to optimise customer experiences and self-serve options online, freeing up more of your agents to close more of those all-important Black Friday sales.
Final Thoughts
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail! Get to grips with what’s driving your most valuable sales calls ahead of the Black Friday deadline so you can ensure campaigns are totally optimised and your budget will work as hard as possible for you. With tools like Infinity’s Conversation Analytics, retailers can get their hands on the unfiltered truth from customers. This helps you understand what’s driving interest as well as highlighting any common doubts or barriers to purchase that might exist This helps you continuously refine messaging to create harder hitting campaigns that will ultimately drive more conversion.
By implementing call tracking, businesses can get a better idea of the pre-call journey that customers are taking, and use this information to best optimise the journey going forward, understanding and nurturing customers effectively.
As a specialist PPC agency, Circus PPC are well versed in strategising for clients to ensure that they are best set up for success during peak periods such as Black Friday. From cross-channel alignment and effective tracking, to budget efficiency and ad copy – Circus PPC Agency are experienced in helping clients to see desired results, often exceeding expectations.
For more on ensuring your PPC strategy performs effectively during the Black Friday period, download Circus PPC’s Black Friday Blueprint here.
Black Friday Ads: Your Strategy Guide
Want to level up your Black Friday ads? There’s no better time than now to do so!
We know that Black Friday is a few months away yet, but the earlier you start planning, the better!
Read on for three of the most important steps when it comes to planning for your Black Friday ads strategy, and hear from our experts about their must-dos and no-go’s for a successful seasonal period.
Three Steps for Black Friday Ads Success
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to PPC, never mind during Black Friday. However, there are a few things that anyone running Black Friday ads should be considering to drive success.
Preparation
When it comes to preparation for Black Friday, there truly is no time like the present.
One of the biggest mistakes made in the run up to Black Friday is leaving planning to the last minute – failing to be prepared is preparing to fail!
Our comprehensive Black Friday Checklist can help you to start the planning process before it’s too late, download it here.
Budgets
Due to the uplift in shopper intent during Black Friday, many businesses choose to invest more in PPC during this period.
In the past, we’ve seen budgets for Black Friday increase significantly in order to adhere to demand and an uplift in buying intent from shoppers, and having these budgets agreed on in advance is important to both drive the best possible performance through budget allocation, as well as making sure that budget doesn’t run out on Black Friday.
Timeframe
Despite Black Friday being advertised as a one-day event, it’s not uncommon for businesses to spread Black Friday activity over a full week, month, or sometimes even longer.
Search behaviour has evolved, and shoppers are doing more research before purchasing than ever before. In the run-up to Black Friday, this research could be the difference between a conversion for your business, or a competitor, so ensuring that you’re visible in the run up to (not just on) Black Friday is essential. Additionally, continuing promotions following the ‘official’ Black Friday period could improve your conversions as you pick up on those who may have missed the peak sales period.
Expert PPC Tips for Black Friday Ads
Having been through the Black Friday preparation period plenty of times already, our experts have shared their tips that will ensure your Black Friday ads are effective. Read on for more.
“My biggest tip for a successful Black Friday would be to not leave preparation for the last minute, because there are so many things you have to align. What are the promotions going to be? How much do you expect to sell? This is to ensure that the client orders the right amount of products to meet that quota. My first conversation about Black Friday this year was in February, which is quite early, but when you take into account all of the months of preparation needed internally to accommodate something as big as Black Friday, then sometimes the conversations have to happen pretty early.”
“My biggest piece of advice for Black Friday would be to get all budgets approved well ahead of time, and implemented as early as possible.”
“My biggest tip for a successful Black Friday would be to get started way earlier than you think. Now more than ever, it’s not just a single day – it’s a month, or sometimes even more than a month. Start looking at your budgets early, start looking at what you want to capture early, and most importantly make sure your tracking is working as attribution can take us back as far as 90 days. Make sure you know what you want to achieve, and that will lead to a key bit of performance over the month.”
“My biggest piece of advice for Black Friday would be to plan your promotions in advance. Make sure you know all the ins and outs of your promotions including when they’re starting and when they end. A lot of people leave it to the last minute, which means that they can’t get a lot of the activity approved that they need to get approved. It’s such a busy time and you want to make sure you’re taking as much real estate up on the search results page as you can.”
What Now?
To get your hands on our exclusive PPC Black Friday Blueprint – jam-packed with practical advice from our PPC experts, real-life case studies, and marketing insights from partners including Salesfire, Lunio, Shoptimised and Infinity – download here!
Google Marketing Live 2024: An Overview
Yesterday evening, marketers all over the globe gathered to tune into the highly anticipated Google Marketing Live 2024. And it’ll be no surprise to anyone that there was a huge focus on… AI.
Now in its 11th year, Google Marketing Live’s first ever focus back in 2013 was the ‘shift to mobile,’ whilst now, we’re faced with the ‘most transformative moment yet’ – the new era of AI and the possibilities that come along with it.
The conference focused on the ways in which different Google products and services are harnessing the power of AI to help consumers, businesses and agencies alike, and how we can make sure we’re ahead of the curve by utilising these new technologies.
Google Marketing Live 2024: Our Top Takeaways
We’ve condensed the event to bring you 5 of our biggest takeaways, and provided our thoughts on how each of the products could help both brands, and advertisers, going forward.
Profit Optimisation
The new ‘Profit Optimisation’ goal for PMax and Shopping campaigns was introduced, with claims that it will help enhance the effects of Smart Bidding to maximise profit, and according to Google, ‘advertisers who use this see a 15% uplift in campaigns compared to revenue-only bidding.’
“Profit Optimisation is something Google have been pushing for a while in terms of understanding which areas companies make most profit, so it’s been a long time coming that profit based goals are now at the forefront of PMax optimisation. It’ll be interesting to see how Google facilitate fleshing out profit margins for individual products to help companies achieve their business goals in the current economic climate. With users researching at the same rate but taking longer to convert, it’s costing companies more to bring users back to site, so focusing only on higher profit products is a great way to combat this.”
Chloe Tetmajeris, PPC Manager
Google Ads Data Manager
Self proclaimed ‘data guy’ at Google, Gaurav Bhaya, spoke about – you guessed it – data, and the importance of good first-party data in order to maximise AI performance. He also announced the rollout of Google Ads Data Manager worldwide, which simplifies the process of bringing first-party data together in one place, redacting the need for manual data cleansing, organising, and uploading.
“The Google Data Manager dashboard will be a huge benefit to us to collect our data in one place quicker than ever. Google’s dashboard is always evolving, making it harder to find what you’re looking for with every update. The slight increase in visibility to PMax performance alongside this this will also be beneficial, and having quicker generated insights will help with all areas of management. However, as with any AI tool, I believe the prompts and requests will need to be finetuned, which is where we’d come in to make it work.”
Ru Watt, PPC Analyst
Brand Profiles
Going back to the constant evolution of the way consumers search, it was revealed during GML that ‘60% of search queries include the brand name.’ Brand Profiles focus on a higher level of customer engagement during the shopping process, allowing brands to showcase their ethos through images, videos, reviews, deals, shipping and more, with ads continuing to appear alongside these profiles.
“Brand Profiles are an interesting new feature, and are slightly reminiscent of Amazon Storefront. Brands will be able to highlight key merchant information on Search, featuring brand imagery, videos, customer reviews, deals, and more. Advertisers who take the time to curate their Brand Profile will hopefully build more trust with their customers and create a better online shopping experience.”
Meg Wilson-Taylor, Operations Manager
Shopping Ads
The way Shopping ads work have been further revolutionised, with features such as ‘3D spin’ and ‘virtual try-on’ introduced to drive engagement, as well as ads highlighting key attributes from descriptions and reviews.
“New advances in Shopping ad functionality means that companies are going to need to provide more interactive video assets to ensure they’re not left behind. Users want to see products and even try them on virtually before they buy – mistakes could be made if companies underestimate the power of creative assets that could be pivotal for the future of Shopping ads.”
Chloe Tetmajeris, PPC Manager
YouTube Shopping
Google stated that ‘in 2023, people watched over 30bn hours of shopping-related videos on YouTube, a growth of 25% year-on-year.’ Now, YouTube has made it possible for creators to tag products in their videos, shorts and live steams, and alongside this, have partnered with Shopify to eventually allow Shopify merchants to connect their product catalogue to YouTube shopping. This will provide better insights into the creators and products that are driving sales.
“The video content market is huge as evidenced by stats given by Google, so to enable shopping feed integration is massive. Having this as a tool to offer clients generative feed placements, reverse image search and video snippets will be a boost to sales and platforms with deliverables on quick to purchase ecommerce products. Combined with higher quality first-party data captured across the board, online shopping will change drastically.”
Ru Watt, PPC Analyst
What’s next?
Towards the end of the conference, we heard some final thoughts, with the core message that AI isn’t going anywhere, and that there still needs to be a mindset shift when it comes to the way we work alongside AI.
Whilst it’s no surprise that this year’s event was heavily focussed on AI and its capabilities, we were waiting and left wanting for a little more around the daily issues we’re facing as advertisers, such as high CPCs. The event was also honing in on solutions for travel and ecommerce businesses, and limited in terms of lead generation updates.
Despite not getting everything we wanted from this year’s conference, the deep-dive into both AI and data painted a clear picture of the direction that Google continues to move in, and it’s time for advertisers and brands to strap in and utilise the technologies available to see the best possible results.
We’ll leave you with a final quote from Google Marketing Live 2024, which I’m sure will resonate with many as we go forward and put everything we’ve heard into practice.
‘The secret to getting ahead, is getting started.’
PPC Strategy 101: Setting PPC Goals
Whether you’re starting from scratch, or looking at implementing a new and improved strategy, there are a number of factors that can help you to understand how to reach your PPC goals.
From budgeting and audience targeting, to keyword research and testing, we’ve helped scale and grow hundreds of brand accounts, helping them to reach their PPC goals and even win an award or two along the way.
Now, we’re sharing our insights for success, and in this first instalment, discussing the key components of a successful strategy, and what your first steps should be as you start planning.
Key components of a successful PPC strategy
Every strategy is unique, but there are some components that can be applied across all accounts and can help to drive your business forward. We’ve defined ten steps to success:
- Understanding PPC account strategy
- Setting goals and objectives
- Audience targeting and persona development
- Keyword research and selection
- Ad copy and creative development
- Budget allocation and bid management
- Landing page optimisation
- Tracking, measurement and analysis
- Testing and iteration
- Scaling and expansion
Getting to grips with these areas will help you on the way to a successful strategy that delivers your PPC goals.
Before anything else, understanding strategy and defining said goals should be at the very top of your to-do list when it comes to implementing a successful (and maybe even award-winning) PPC strategy.
Defining short-term and long-term PPC goals
PPC, whilst known for being able to drive quicker conversions in comparison to SEO, shouldn’t only be considered as a short-term strategy or ‘quick fix.
In fact, laying solid foundations for a long-term PPC strategy is a great way to make sure that your account is set up for success, and can deliver both quick wins and sustainable growth.
For example, having worked with our client, Miele, since 2015, we considered both short-term and long-term goals, remaining focused on their core goal of improving ROI and driving business growth. Some shorter-term goals have included testing new strategies, measuring specific KPIs, and adapting to market fluctuations, peak seasonal periods, and changing consumer behaviour and demands. All of these short-term goals helped us to build a strong foundation for the account, which then led to performance improvements over time.
Miele Account Manager, Donya Broadhead, spoke about the importance of understanding the client’s account through initial short and long-term goal setting:
“The first and most important task for me was to understand what Miele wanted from their PPC strategy, which then helped me to make suggestions to reach their desired goals. Our long-standing relationship with this client means that we’ve not only seen wins over shorter periods such as Black Friday or peak sales, but also incremental growth over a number of years. It also means that we better understand our client’s market and industry, and have adapted where the client needs us to in order to deliver the best possible results.”
Getting Started
Our most recent whitepaper dives into the ten steps to success, with advice and insights from our team of PPC experts, practical guidance on how to implement your own strategy, real-life examples of success, and so much more. Get your copy here!
Creating An Award-Winning PPC Strategy
What’s the best course of action when it comes to creating a successful, or even award-winning, PPC strategy?
From budget allocation to goal setting, and keyword research to tracking – we’re here give you an overview of the ten areas of importance you need to know about when it comes to creating an award-winning PPC strategy.
Why PPC?
Many businesses see significant improvement in revenue, sales, and return-on-investment after implementing a PPC strategy, and alongside the use of other marketing channels and strategies, PPC can be an essential ingredient in a recipe for success.
In our latest whitepaper, we’ll be deep-diving into our work with high-end household appliance brand, Miele, and how we helped them to drive profitable growth with award-winning PPC strategies.
Our Guide To A Successful PPC Strategy
Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming whitepaper, where we’ll walk you through our ten steps to developing a successful PPC strategy:
- Understanding PPC Account Strategy
- Setting Objectives and Goals
- Audience Targeting and Persona Development
- Keyword Research and Selection
- Ad Copy and Creative Development
- Budget Allocation and Bid Management
- Landing Page Optimisation
- Tracking, Measurement and Analysis
- Testing and Iteration
- Scaling and Expansion
Read on as we take a dip into each of the above areas, and talk about why they’re so important to drive success.
The Ten Steps To Success
We’ve put together an overview of each of our steps to an award-winning PPC strategy, and why they’re so important in helping you to see the results you want for your business.
Understanding PPC Strategy
What do you want to see from PPC? How will it work within your business? Who will be managing your account? Will you be running it in-house, or working with an agency?
These are just some of the questions you should be asking yourself in order to understand how to correctly produce and implement a PPC strategy that works, and drives the results you want to see.
Setting Objectives and Goals
What’s a strategy without an end goal?
Your goals and objectives are the driving force behind your strategy, and should be one of the first – if not the first – things you consider before beginning to build out your PPC account.
Audience Targeting and Persona Development
One of the biggest mistakes that a business can make when it comes to their PPC strategy is not successfully defining their target audience. After all, what’s the use in driving traffic to your website if it isn’t the right traffic.
By defining and understand your target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours, you’ll be one step closer to creating ad campaigns that reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
Keyword Research and Selection
Research to find the right, relevant keywords to bid on as part of your PPC strategy is essential to understand where you should be focusing your efforts.
When selecting keywords, it’s important to keep your target audience in mind, as well as relevance and intent in order to drive conversions.
Ad Copy and Creative Development
Your ad copy is one of the key factors in what will help you to stand out against competitors, and like with everything else throughout your strategy, should be carefully considered against the message you want to portray, your brand, your product, and your target audience.
Your ad copy should also reflect the promise or sale information on the accompanying landing page, and vice versa, in order to remain trustworthy in the eyes of both your customers, and advertising platforms.
Budget Allocation
One of the first things we do when auditing an account is identify where budget is being wasted, and where it can be better allocated to drive performance.
When performance is going seemingly well, you might not realise that it could be going even better by reallocating budgets from lower-performing areas, so carrying out regular account audits is a great way to remain aware of what exactly is going on in your account.
Landing Page Optimisation
Your landing page should be a combination of everything you know about your product or service, your ads and ad copy, and your target audience.
This is the first thing your consumers are going to see when they click on your ad, so your landing’s page job is to keep your potential customer interested, and hopefully, push them to convert.
Tracking, Measurement and Analysis
Faulty tracking can be a real problem when it comes analysing and understanding your results from PPC, as this can skew numbers, and paint the wrong picture of what is actually working – which can lead to wasted budget.
Having fully working, correct tracking in place can help you to further measure and analyse the correct results, and produce reports on the right information to help guide your strategy going forward.
Testing and Iteration
Test, test, test!
Continuous testing in PPC campaigns can help you to recognise what works, and equally as important, what doesn’t work. Without testing, accounts can become stagnant, peak, and reach the limit of what they could possibly achieve by exploring new activity.
Following any successful test, activity can then be implemented in other areas to carry on testing and hopefully, drive similar results.
Scaling and Expansion
Ultimately, the goal of PPC is growth, which can be achieved through implementing a strong foundation and having both short-term and long-term plans in place.
Previous points such as testing, budget allocation, and keyword research can assist with balancing growth and campaign efficiency, as they provide the essential insights into how your account works, what helps, and what hinders performance.
Your Next Steps To A Successful PPC Strategy
We’ve developed a whitepaper taking a comprehensive deep-dive into our ten steps to success, with practical advice on how to carry out keyword research and audience profiling, tips and tricks from our PPC experts, and real world examples from our own award-winning client, Miele.
Circus PPC Reveals Office Move
Circus PPC Agency have announced their plans to double the size of their office as a result of team growth, just two years after originally moving into their Leeds City Centre headquarters.
The specialist PPC agency, which resides at the recently refurbished Tailors Corner in Leeds, won’t be moving too far afield, and rather taking over the entire 3rd floor of the building.
Rick Tobin, Managing Director, said of the move:
“We made the huge decision to upgrade our office space back in 2022 – despite many other businesses downsizing due to the popularity of remote working – and it’s helped us to drive further agency growth. Regardless of the move, we’ve continued our completely flexible hybrid working policy, which everyone in the agency hugely values.
Tailors Corner is a fantastic space, which is why rather than moving elsewhere in the city centre, we’re jumping down a couple of floors to take over the entire 3rd floor.”
Circus PPC have once again enlisted Ben Johnson to bring their new office space to life, which includes an extendable boardroom, additional dining area, extra single-person meeting rooms, and a large open plan workspace.
In addition to the move, the agency is also hoping to grow the team by another 30%, bringing in 5 new PPC experts to help them take the business to the next level and facilitate their rapidly-growing client database.
Circus PPC Achieves Biggest January On Record
We’ve driven a YOY managed spend increase of 23%, as well as growing our team by 38%.
In addition to YOY growth, we also saw several client wins in January 2024, including Where Saints Go, Furniture.co.uk, Hair Gain Now, Steel Products Direct, Pineapple Island, CPD, and Personal Group.
We have ambitious growth plans for 2024, which includes expanding the agency and near doubling our client database. Having already increased the size of our team by 38% YOY, we’re looking to hire another 5 PPC experts this year to help facilitate our growing client roster.
Managing Director, Rick Tobin, said:
“It’s been an incredible start to the year, and we’re looking forward to working with even more exciting, determined clients, and expanding our team of experts. We love what we do, and love being both a great company to work with and work for, so we’re excited to be able to continue growing both of those areas within the agency.”
2023 Recap: 10 Highlights From The Past Year
Welcome to our 2023 recap! Over the past 12 months, we’ve continued to grow as an agency, celebrating more achievements, wins, success and fun than ever before!
However, there are a few highlights that shone for us – keep reading for 10 of our chosen moments that made our year, many of which we hope to continue (or get even better at) in 2024…
Our 2023 Recap
Despite the challenges that 2023 brought, we still saw the agency grow and flourish during the past year – including seeing our biggest month on record in November! Read on for some of our top highlights from 2023…
10 Agency Highlights
In no particular order, here are some of the moments we loved as an agency during 2023:
- Winning PPC Agency of the Year… twice!
We won ‘PPC Agency of Year’ not once, but twice, at both the UK Digital Excellence Awards and UK Digital Growth Awards… hat-trick in 2024?
- Growing the team
We welcomed four awesome new experts to the team this year: PPC Executives Luisa, Lauren and Mo, and PPC Reports Analyst Dev!
- Achieving our biggest Black Friday on record
This year’s Black Friday was bigger than ever before, and we saw a total revenue increase of 59% for clients over the Black Friday weekend! We only expect this to rise next year! For more Black Friday analysis, read our full report here.
- Working with amazing clients
Every year, one of the most amazing things to look back on is the incredible work we do with clients, and how awesome they are to work with. We’ve loved every minute working with our fantastic clients this year, and have welcomed some awesome new brands to our roster!
- Hosting our first ever panel event
Back in September, we opened up our doors as part of Leeds Digital Festival and invited our friends from Salesfire and Shoptimised to talk about all things CRO! Listen to the full recording of the event here.
- Toasting to our 14th birthday
It might be cliché, but every year we celebrate our birthday and look back at how we’ve grown as an agency and celebrate many more successful years to come!
- Introducing weekly team time
One of the best things about working in a team of experts is being able to knowledge-share and solve problems together. Earlier this year, we introduced weekly ‘team time’ on Thursday afternoons to discuss topics and share ideas that will help us deliver even better results for our clients.
- Exhibiting at events across the North
We joined the team at Marketing Showcase for their Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester events, as well as the Salesfire team at their first ever Salesfire Summit. Listen to our Commercial Director, Ahmed’s, talk at Marketing Showcase Leeds here.
- Maintaining our Google Premier Partner status (again!)
Since Google introduced its Premier Partner programme, we’ve proudly maintained Premier Partner status that allows us greater insight into products, betas, updates and more from Google.
- Organising awesome team events to celebrate
Our legendary summer and Christmas parties were back for 2023, where we celebrated our achievements as a team and enjoyed some time away from the office together. This year, we rented out a lodge in York for summer, and headed across the Pennines to Manchester for a festive night out.
And that’s all from our 2023 recap! Thank you to our clients, partners, and friends for the continuous support you provide to help us be the best we can be. But most importantly, a big thank you to our amazing team, who we know will go on to smash another year as we enter 2024!
PPC Predictions 2024
The ever-changing landscape of PPC means that as advertisers, we don’t only expect change, but have learnt to embrace it. This means that PPC trends are constantly changing, and our experts have their own thoughts on what 2024 might hold.
Throughout 2023, we saw planned changes and updates from ad platforms, including at Google’s annual Google Marketing Live event, which touched upon some of the newest updates and information from the platform that will certainly change the way advertisers work in the future.
So, there are already some anticipated and confirmed changes that we’re expecting in the near future. The Circus PPC experts have offered up their personal predictions of the PPC trends that we might see next year.
2024’s PPC Trends Predictions
From rising CPCs and platform updates, to a decline in available data and a continuing uplift in AI – the team have offered up their predictions for the year ahead:
“Following pressure from PPC managers and business owners to share more data, Google will do so through their own API (or with scripts), meaning that only a limited number of people will be able to see the data.”
Ahmed Chopdat, Commercial Director
“The decline of third-party cookies. Google announced that third-party cookies won’t be supported by Chrome by the end of 2024 (other browsers like Safari and Firefox are already blocking them) as they attempt to improve user privacy.”
“I think we’ll see a big decline in available data from the Google Ads Platform due to the reception of GA4, which has already led to less visibility on the whole PPC journey as it is. This will drive customers to look for more third-party analytics systems generally.”
“Google will add more elements into Auto-apply Recommendations (AAR), and hide them in the system so it’s harder to opt out. However, this will present an easy win for advertisers when they onboard new accounts, as they will be able to get some quick wins from opting out of AAR that doesn’t benefit the client’s goals.”
Meg Wilson-Taylor, Operations Manager
“In a move towards ‘increased data flow, leading to improved performance’, I think Google will announce that the phasing out of Phrase Match keywords, and encourage advertisers to make use of Broad Match as part of their main search strategy. Long-term I see Exact changing as well, but would expect Phrase to go first.”
Anna Wood, Head of Client Services
“Bing recently introduced PMax, but considering the high level of automation, I doubt that many accounts will see positive performance. In the past, I’ve noticed that automation can perform weakly on Bing due to a smaller traffic and sales volume, which in turn, will elongate the time taken for the algorithm to learn.”
“Amazons ad revenue has grown 26% year on year and I expect this trend to continue into 2024 and beyond. They are going to develop more opportunities for advertisers, and will overtake Meta as the second largest ad platform in terms of ad revenue spend.”
“AI will continue to advance, and features such as auto-created assets will become more effortless, error-free and popular amongst advertisers.”
“Definitely an uptake in the use of AI. The potential it has to reduce the time and effort spent on mundane tasks is unmatched, and can free up time for more important activity.”
“CPCs are only going to continue to rise, which means that it’s more important than ever for advertisers and agencies to work closely with clients to best optimise their website to help improve conversion rates and drive growth.”
For more expert commentary, analysis and thoughts from our talented team of PPC professionals, check out our 2023 Black Friday Report – packed with insights around this year’s seasonal shopping event.
Circus PPC Celebrates Biggest Black Friday On Record
Circus PPC are celebrating Black Friday success with 2023 being the most triumphant on record.
The agency they grew overall client revenue by 29%, despite previous reports that consumer spending could take a hit due to the current state of the economy. In addition to this, they also saw an increase of 20% in revenue on Cyber Monday.
The agency also saw significant revenue increases across the following industries on Black Friday:
- Fashion (23%)
- Homeware (39%)
- Hobbies (68%)
- Gifting (94%)
Circus’s Commercial Director, Ahmed, said:
“Black Friday is our biggest day of the year – and has become a huge sales day for many of our clients too. This year we exceeded our revenue targets, despite reports that many consumers will be reducing spending as a result of the current state of the economy.
Despite generally seeing lower traffic than expected, we saw a total 29% increase in revenue across all of our client’s account, which drove a stronger ROI for the majority of these clients!
It’s great to see our hard work pay off and to see our client’s businesses growing amongst such an unstable market – it speaks wonders about our team’s talent and expertise. This Black Friday success is a testament to what we can do!”
Trade Furniture, a Circus client since July 2022, saw incredible YOY increases of 71% in Black Friday revenue, an incredible 301% in Cyber Monday revenue, and 171% in revenue over the whole weekend. Christina Whitworth, Operations Manager, said of the growth:
“We’ve had a great month this month, and I am feeling confident about next year with your team behind us – and in this climate that speaks volumes.”