Get Google to help with Christmas

Some simple tips for using Google Adwords in your Christmas online marketing campaign.

1) Budget Correctly

For some retail businesses we have seen search volumes more than double for particular products.

Firstly, AdWords users should prepare for the huge increase in traffic volume and a change in competitor behaviour. So double check your search volumes and budgeting, if you are looking for 80%+ Impression Share you will need to increase our budget.

2) Should you offer promotions

YES! Christmas and especially Black Friday is a great time to use special offers as an incentive for people to do business with your company. Whether it is a discounted price, faster shipping, or a small gift with each purchase. Keep an watchful eye on your competition. If you can beat your competitor’s offer this will help conversion rates.

3) Adwords Extensions

You can boost your paid search performance with little effort simply by using Ad Extensions. With minimal set-up time they are free and they help increase click-through rates at no additional cost.

It can be tough to decide which extensions to focus on as they are a few to choose from. If you can use all of them. But you should at least use – Call Extensions, SiteLinks Extensions and the most recent Structured snippets allow you to add styles and brands.

4) Avoid Ad fatigue with Ad-Customizers

Since September 2014 Google launched An Ad customizers. Creating a sense of urgency in your ads has long since been a technique of marketers. An Ad-Customiser is a good technique to entice your audience to click.

Ad customizers will automatically update your ad with your tailored message and time-sensitive calls to action. You can use the countdown code to let users know how many days are remaining on your offer.

Simply add the following code into your ads. {=COUNTDOWN(“YYYY/MM/DD 09:00:00”)}

5) Use Google Shopping

If you are a retailer and not using Google Shopping you really are missing out. Google shopping results can help customers reduce their CPC and if you products are not as keenly priced as your competitors they can be good at qualifying clicks before they visit your site and incur you a cost.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fzFs7O1gmrQ

5) Brainstorm Your USPs

Christmas time is important so it’s important you take 10 minutes (or more) to write down all the various attributes you would consider attractive for your customers. Don’t get hung up on whether or not it fits into the 25 and 35 character limits in your ads. This time is about brainstorming.

What happens when you try to think of attributes for your ads and at the same time discard options that don’t fit within the character limits is that your creativity is stifled. You end up with the ability to only come up with one or two decent ads, which is not sufficient.

6) Time-wasting

Depending on the size of your Adwords account it is easy to lose hours in Adwords.

This one’s so simple. Schedule reports from AdWords to automatically be sent to your email. These can be customised with the metrics you need.

Select the users to receive and frequency. Set up simple reporting to automatically be delivered to key stakeholders to keep them in the loop and saves time running ad hoc reports.

7) Avoid Broad Match keywords

There are three type matches you can choose from in Adwords, Phrase, exact and broad. Broad match allows Google to interpret your keyword and deliver your ad based on what it understands is a similar match. So far so good you might think.

Let’s say you own a shoe shop. You sell shoes of all shapes and sizes in the UK. In particular your sell lost of Red Sports Shoes, you then set your ads up and set your keyword to Broad Match.

Weeks later you see lots of click and loads of impressions…but not a lot of sales. Little do you realise that your ad is being delivered for the following keywords;

Red Sports Cars
Red Shoes (male or female)

If you insist on using Broad Match keywords, make sure you also use Negative keywords. Here is a list you can add into your account today.

free
cheap
nude
naked
sex
porn
porno
torrent
torrents
youtube

8) Don’t listen to Google’s suggestions

Google is good at a great many things including making money. However, it is utterly rubbish at suggesting what keywords you can add to your account.

Briefly looking through the 175 suggested keywords that Google in it’s wisdom has suggested reveals the vast majority of the keywords weren’t usable. So if you do feel the need to click on the suggestion – YOU ARE WARNED!

9) A Word about Quality Score

Quality Score is the metric that flows through almost every aspect of Adwords. There are various levels of Quality Score including; Account level, Ad Group, and Keyword level. If you have 10/10 all is well in your adwords world. However, if you have anything sub 6 you need to take car as you will be getting charged a premium for your efforts.

The following chart illustrates the premium you could be being charged if you let your quality score slip.