The biddible. Guide to AdWords at Christmas
CONTENTS. Page 2 Important Dates Page 3 & 4 Search Campaigns Page 5 Shopping Campaigns Page 6 Display Campaigns Page 7 & 8 Remarketing Campaigns Page 9 About biddible.
Important Dates. 27th 30th BLACK FRIDAY. 27TH NOVEMBER 2015 CYBER MONDAY. 30TH NOVEMBER 2015 This USA holiday has grown year on year in the UK. But, unlike the USA, Black Friday has become a digital led purchase in the UK with many people filling their baskets ahead of the 27th so they can return on the day to buy their items and take advantage of the savings. Similar to Black Friday, Cyber Monday is another day in which retailers discount many of their products to encourage sales. But unlike Black Friday, Cyber Monday is exclusively online. 7th 14th MANIC MONDAY. 7TH DECEMBER 2015 GREEN MONDAY. 14TH DECEMBER 2015 Manic Monday takes place on the first Monday of every December and has always represented a spike in traffic and sales. In 2014, Manic Monday outperformed Cyber Monday with almost 500,000 spent online every minute. Green Monday falls on the second Monday of December and was coined by ebay to describe their best sales day in December. 21st 19th SUPER SATURDAY. 19TH DECEMBER 2015 Super Saturday or Panic Saturday as it is sometimes referred too is the last Saturday before Christmas. It can also mark the end of the shopping season for many. Super Saturday is renowned for those last minute shoppers making impulse purchases. LAST POST DATES. 21ST December Last 2nd Class Post 22nd December Last 1st Class Post 23rd December Last Next Day Delivery 2
Search Campaigns. Whilst search has been in recession since the emergence of Google Shopping, it s still important to revisit this time honoured tradition during the festive shopping period. KEYWORDS. AD COPY. Selecting the right keywords at this time of year is essential and it s not just about bidding on those keywords that you hope to convert immediately. If you have the budget, it s time to look at the pre-purchase keywords too. Keywords like Gift Ideas, Gifts for Her & Him massively spike this time of year. Make sure you have created landing pages catered to these types of search terms, write blog posts and go social! It s time to go relevant and seasonal! When it comes to Christmas, people are looking for value and speed. Ideally, you will be offering free delivery, if so, make sure it is in your ad. If not, you may not want to include your delivery charge, as at least one of your competitors will be offering it for free and promoting it. Product review keywords also spike at this time of year, people want to make sure they get the best gift for their loved ones, not just any gift. If you ve been spending all year building up your on-site product reviews and off-site company reviews, then it s time to let that hard work pay off. If you have no reviews, well you ve got 13 months before next Christmas to change that. Make sure you re doing your keyword research now, if you haven t already! Stress your stock availability, if quantities are low, use it in your Ad Copy to create some urgency. If you re price competitive, use ad parameters to keep your prices up to date. If you offer Free Returns at this time of year, make sure you push this too. Yes, it might encourage a few more returns than you wanted, but that will be far outweighed by the amount of extra sales you receive from those impulse buyers who keep your products. Do you offer next day delivery? People hate to wait for their products to come and next day delivery quite often means people are happy to pay slightly more to quickly get their hands on what they want. As December moves on this will become more and more important. Use a countdown in your Ads, countdown the days to Christmas, or how many shopping days are left before the last post. If your Ads are pointing out that there is only 5 shopping days left and if you offer next day delivery, you have a far greater chance of winning the business. 3
Search Campaigns. AD EXTENSIONS. ADDRESS. If you don t use Ad Extensions, then now is the time to do it and if you have been using them, it s time update them and keep updating them frequently! The 4 core Ad Extensions for you to stay on top of are as follows: Don t be fooled into thinking that everyone is looking to buy online. Many people are using their devices to search whilst on the high street to look for stores that sell the product they are looking for or price compare whilst instore. If you have a store then let people know they can come to you. SITE LINKS. Don t just use 4 generic site links for every campaign, go granular for every Ad Group that you have. If your Ad Groups are category level keywords, then the Site Links should be the four most popular products in the category. If your Ad Groups are product level, then your Site Links should be similar or complimentary products. Or if the product searched for is available as part of a bigger bundle that offers an overall saving, then include that too. CALL OUTS. Quite simply, call outs are your chance to shout about your USP s. You can reinforce the USP s that you should have included in your Ad Copy or you can shout about other USP s. BIDS. Be prepared to manage bids daily and even hourly as the Christmas shopping period really does get aggressive. Make sure you understand your product margins and pay close attention to your Impression Share and Average Position. If you are making a positive Return on Ad Spend and your Impression Share is low, keep increasing those bids to win more auctions and business. Your competitors will also be increasing their bids too, so be prepared for a daily battle! Phone Number. Disclaimer, adding your phone number could increase customer service calls. If you re not equipped to deal with these calls, you may not want to add your number. But, adding your number breeds confidence that you re more than just a website. Some people still prefer to speak to people, to find out if you have something in stock or if they can pick it up from one of your stores. If you re a national business with many stores, make sure you re serving the right store numbers to the right people. In 2014, mobile commerce sales grew 29% year on year during Cyber Monday 4
Shopping Campaigns. This is the key time of year for Google Shopping. If you re only running one All Products Shopping campaign, then you will most likely have fairly good but not exceptional Christmas. Now is the time to really segment your Shopping campaigns. Spend some time in Google Analytics analysing your Ecommerce tracking from the past 12 months to understand which products, brands and categories that have sold well. If you sell other people s products then split your Shopping Campaigns by Brand > Category and even as far as product if you have the depth of range. If you sell your own products than split your campaigns out by Category > Product and make sure you re paying close attention to your margin, Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Impression Share. If your ROAS is higher than your margin and you have a low Impression Share, then you have room to grow and sell even more. GOOGLE MERCHANT CENTRE. Make sure you also spend some time in your Google Merchant Centre reviewing your feed. Pay attention to the warnings and errors and any products that are not searchable. Make sure you reduce or eradicate the warnings to take full advantage this Christmas. 48% of shoppers completed their shopping on or before Cyber Monday Whilst it s key to segment your Shopping campaigns, this doesn t mean you should abandon your All Products campaign! Your All Products campaign should become your Catch All and serve as a backup. Lastly, don t forget to create a Shopping Remarketing campaign, whilst it is a fairly new product in AdWords, early testing has shown amazing returns! Shopper interest in deals increases 20% on November 1st 5
Display Campaigns. If you ve not be running Display Ads this year or if you ve turned them off due to poor performance. Now is the time to dust them down, update your ads and get yourself back out there. Over the past few years, AdWords have massively improved the features of the Display Network and whilst we see Remarketing as a separate entity, the Display Network has more than enough features to make it a success for you this Christmas. Keywords IN MARKET BUYERS. A perfect tool for Christmas, In Market buyers are a collection of people who Google have deemed to be looking for something particular to buy. By targeting people who are looking for what you sell, you can increase your direct conversions, your view through conversions and your brand searches. PLACEMENTS. If you don t have the budget to target Gift Ideas etc through search, then the Display Network offers a vastly more cost effective way to get your brand seen. Targeting these types of keywords can get your ads and messaging seen across many Gift Idea websites that enjoy a sharp increase in traffic at this time of year. Use the Placement search or the Display Planner to find eligible websites, review the websites and make sure you create ads that stand out, not blend in! Over 15 Billion is expected to be spent online in the retail sector this Christmas The UK s Black Friday is again expected to improve year on year. 6
Remarketing Campaigns. Are you still running the usual suspects when it comes to Remarketing, All Visitors & Basket Abandons? Yes, well join the other 90% of AdWords users who are only scratching the surface of Remarketing. You can make custom combinations from any of these such as: We re not saying that those targeting methods don t work, we re just saying you re missing out on a lot more! These visitors have engaged well with your website and whilst they have not bought yet, it is worthwhile targeting them. Firstly, let s start by looking at the differences between AdWords Audience Lists and Analytics Audience Lists. Demographics = Male, Aged 34 to 45 + Transactions = More than 1 Session Duration = 3 mins or more + Sessions = 1 or More + Transactions = 0 AdWords. Target your core demographics who have bought from you in the past as they are far more likely to buy from you again! This feature allows you to target and segment visitors based on what URL they have visited. You can use combinations of URL s, target people who visited specific products pages or categories. It works and it s nice. Date of First Session = 1st November 2015 to 22nd December 2015 + Average Time on Site = 3 mins or more + Transactions = 0 Analytics. This feature allows you to target people based on the following: URL Visited Average Time on Site Pages per Session Demographics Location Device Medium (Organic, PPC etc) Source (Facebook, AdWords etc) Date of First Session Transactions Bounce Rate Language In Market Segment Affinity Category Operating System Browser Any many more Start building an audience list based on people who are visiting your website between November and December who have engaged well but are yet to purchase. These are your typical window shoppers, they are doing their research and there is a great chance that they will be back. Date of First Session = 1st November 2015 to 22nd December 2015 & + Transactions = 1 or more Set the membership duration to 540 days for this list. You can t utilise it this year, but come next Christmas, you will still have an audience list of people who bought from you this year which makes them more likely to buy from you again! 7
Remarketing Campaigns. Get creative when it comes to your ads and your messaging, test different messages and different offers. Try offering some of your audience lists free delivery, a monetary or percentage discount to entice them back to your website. Audience lists aren t just for Remarketing, they are also for excluding! So analyse what and who doesn t convert when they hit your website and exclude them from your Search, Display and Remarketing campaigns. Bounce Rate = 60% or More Why would you want to retarget the people who hit your website and leave, you can t please everyone, so stop trying. Average Time on Site = 30 seconds or less If people are spending less than 30 seconds on your website, there isn t much chance that they are really going to come back or buy from you. CUSTOMER MATCH. Launched in early October 2015, Customer Match is a new feature that allows us to add our customer database of emails into AdWords. In a similar way to Facebook and Twitter, AdWords lets you target these people based on the email address they use to sign into Google. AdWords will also create a similar audience list based on the demographics profile of your existing database. If you segment your databases in your own CRM, then upload them to AdWords in a similar way. This way, you can control how you target and speak to each segment of your customers. Try promoting your email content through AdWords by targeting your email database. If you send out a specific message and have created a specific landing page, then make sure you push this out through customer match too. Pages per Session = 1 If people come to your site and visit one page before leaving, well they don t seem very likely to engage with you again. Do you really want to keep spending money targeting them? Demographics = Male, Female, Unknown, Aged 45 to 54 There might be a specific demographic group that your products are not suited too. Sure we have to accept that people will buy things for other people, but how much money do you want to spend targeting the wrong demographic? 8
About biddible. We don't try to be all things to all people, we stick to what we're good at. We are driven by our passion of paid search and other forms of biddable media. We love what we do and it shows in our results. We don't want to be another conventional and predictable digital agency, with anonymous account managers and prices dictated by who you are not what you need. We want to know you and more importantly, we want you to know us. We also believe in keeping things simple. We have a very keen eye for detail, crunching numbers and establishing patterns. We draw on our experience and we undertake a detailed understanding of your customers and key demographics to ensure we are targeting the right people at the right time. We offer management, consultancy and advice and we will tailor our service to meet your needs all at one affordable hourly rate that stays the same, no matter what. Honest Only pay for what you get We don t believe in the 10% model, if a client spends 10,000 per month, but the work only equates to 10 hours, we will only charge them for 10 hours. Instead of charging 1,000 regardless of how much work has been carried out. Our cost methods probably make us the most affordable PPC service provider in the UK. And if the hours required to manage your Paid Search lowers on a monthly basis, then so will our costs. Integrated Every step of the way We manage all Paid touch points of a potential customers online journey. Free Audit Do you need some help with your existing Pay per Click account? Would you like to know how much of your investment has provided a return and how much hasn't? We can tell you where your ads convert better and whether your bidding strategy is working for you, but fundamentally, we can show you the areas of growth that will truly unlock your ROI. Call us on 0191 406 2553 or email info@biddible.co.uk 9