When it comes to setting up and running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, some of them can take place at any time of the year, when there’s no urgency to have a campaign running for a certain time period. However, there are plenty of examples of PPC campaigns for which time sensitivity is important to take advantage of a certain event or time of the year. So, what do you need to do when it comes to time-sensitive PPC in order for your business to be prepared?
Identify Opportunities
The first thing to do is to identify the opportunities that are relevant to your business. If you’re an eCommerce business, then it’s likely that you might be featuring some discounts around Black Friday, so you would have a PPC campaign set up to take advantage of people searching for the products you sell in the lead-up to the event. Christmas and January sales also will require similar preparation.
Another example is the motor industry. March is the busiest period for the industry because this is the month when new car plates are released and major conferences and exhibitions take place. With the buzz around them, a range of different retailers and service providers will want to take advantage of more people searching for specific car-related terms in March than in other months.
And opportunities don’t have to be fixed dates, either. For example, if weather conditions are less than favourable, ad campaigns can be run by businesses that focus on repairing and fixing areas of the home rather than installing new fixtures and fittings.
Analyse Previous PPC Data
As well as a more holistic approach, you can also look at events and trends from a data point of view. In The Google Ads Performance Planner, you can view historical keyword search volumes by month, allowing you to see which months are most popular for certain search terms that are relevant to your business.
We can also look at the historical data from previous campaigns – as we do with We Love Tesla – to see how well campaigns have performed in previous months. Relating back to the motor industry, whilst search volumes didn’t see a significant rise in March, the search intent was much stronger which in turn led to more conversions. That, in turn, led to a better cost per click (CPC) that month. It showed that really focusing on March could produce strong yields, which is something the campaign could adopt annually.
Build, Adjust and Manage Your Campaigns
Based on your findings, you can then go and build your time-critical PPC campaigns well in advance of your event. For larger events like Black Friday, these can be prepared two or three months before, but typically a month is what most events require in PPC preparation.
The first thing to do is to create or update your ad copy, making sure it’s optimised for the keywords that have done well for campaigns in the previous year. If required, you should look to update landing pages so that once your ad is clicked, it can lead to an on-page conversion.
You can then review the budget for the campaign, and if there are more successful keywords for the time you’re running the event, you could look to increase your budget on these to take advantage of higher visibility and better CPC returns.
Rules can also be set for the campaign, and these will be based on labels. These can specify when exactly your advert is showing, and it also automates turning it off once the event has concluded.
After the campaign has run, you can then review all aspects of the campaign to work out what was effective and what could be improved. All the findings can then be used to inform future campaigns.
Work With A Digital Marketing Agency
One of the best ways of making sure your PPC campaigns are created and running in time for a specific event is by handing over the responsibility for your paid advertising to a digital marketing agency.
PPC experts, like the ones we have at DNRG, will be on the ball and acutely aware of time-sensitive calendar events for specific business sectors, ensuring that campaigns can be prepared well in advance through communication with you. It takes the stress out of forward planning on your behalf, as the dates and events you’ll want to target will be figured out weeks and even months in advance through meetings and strategic planning between you and the agency.
Then based on your specifications and budgets, the agency can put together your PPC strategy for eCommerce or whatever field you operate in, and can set up your campaign and have it running, whilst also being able to pause and end the campaigns at any time.
As well as PPC, DNRG offers a wide range of paid and organic marketing services, including Paid Social, SEO and email marketing.
