Holiday Retail PPC Strategies

So, this post will be short and sweet. With the holidays right around the corner, I wanted to point a couple key dates that every pay per click marketer should be focused on. Shift budget, changed ad copy, expand keywords, etc but make sure your accounts are 'live' and online all 24 hours during these huge retail days!


2008 Expected Busiest Shopping Days of Holiday Season:

1. Black Friday: 11/21/2008
2. Cyber Monday: 11/24/2008
3. Green Monday: 12/08/2008

Here are a couple additional trends to focus on for the holiday season:

1. All Mondays during the month of December tend to generate more revenue than other days during the week.
2. On average, the first and second week in December are the highest revenue generating days online.

One final note .. make sure you are calling out your promotions, competitive price points, etc in your ad copy and reinforcing it on your landing pages! Here's to big holiday retail sales!

PPC Quick Fixes: PayPer Click & Low Ad Position

Pay Per Click Advertising and Low Ad Position

Let’s face it: you can write the most amazing ads and your landing page can be wonderful and marvelous, but if your ad isn’t getting noticed, then the rest doesn’t matter. A sure-fire way to gain more attention is by increasing your ad position. Here are some quick fixes to get you ranked higher:

1. Raise your bids! Again, that may seem rudimentary, but let’s just get that out of the way. You need to keep your CPC and ROI in mind. Don’t raise your bids beyond your comfort level, but could a slightly higher ad position increase your clicks, and conversions? It might pay off!
2. AdWords has a very handy tool to help regulate your ad position: Position Preference. This tool does exactly what it’s name says; you can choose your preferred position. This is helpful when determining your “sweet spot”: the ad position where you get the right amount of clicks and conversions.

PPC Basics in 10 Minutes

One of my new favorite blog posts is SEOMoz's white board Fridays - think UPS whiteboard commercial only instead of experts talking about shipping, you have experts talking about SEO and PPC. I found Scott Willoughby's White Board on PPC Basics to be highly informative and thought I would share it as well. Enjoy!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-PPC Basics with Tom Critchlow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

PPC Ad Copy Competition: Myanmar Cyclone Donation

Distilled wanted to do something to mark and bring attention to the launch of their new suite of PPC tools. But, they are bringing attention to their new venture by doing a bit of good - helping out with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal by catering to one of their strengths: PPC advertising!

So what does all this mean? A PPC ad copy writing competition of course! Based on the Myanmar Cyclone tragedy, whoever writes the best PPC ad for charity wins!

Here are the rules:

1. You write a blog post about the competition and include your competing ad(s) in the copy of the blog post - then link to it in Distilled's comments so they know of your desire to enter the competition. The purpose of your post is to spread the word about the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone appeal.

2. Ads must follow the Google Ads format: 25 characters headline (1st line), 35 characters 2nd line, 35 characters 3rd line.

3. Up to three ads may be submitted. However, make sure you rank your submissions as the ads may be limited depending on the number of entries.

4. The landing page you’ll be sending traffic to is http://www.worldvision.org.uk/.

5. They will be purchasing just one keyphrase: ‘Myanmar cyclone appeal’

6. Distilled will put all the ad entries into a PPC campaign with the Myanmar (Burma) cyclone donation page on World Vision as the landing page - deadline is Friday 13th June.

7. Distilled is also fronting the budget to run the PPC campaign for a limited time. The longer the campaign is run the better as it will lead to more donations (and more statistical significance for those competing!). So if anyone is interested in contributing to the PPC budget please get in touch.

8. The ad that performs the best and drives the most amount of traffic wins.

So, all that said, here are my entries from first to last:

{KeyWord:Myanmar Cyclone Aid}
Help Volunteers Rebuild Lives in
Myanmar with Just $25. Donate Today

Myanmar Cyclone Aid
2.4 Million Homeless and Hungry.
Help Cyclone Victims. Donate Today!

Myanmar Cyclone Aid
Their lives were changed in seconds
Help Provide Lifes Essentials

Let me know what you think of the ad copy! (Oh, and keep your fingers crossed we raise a large amount of funds for this terrible tragedy!)

PPC Ad Copy Calls To Action

In an ever competitive paid search market place, enticing viewers to take action (ie. fill out a lead generation form, purchase a product, view a page, etc.) is becoming increasingly difficult. What's worse, is many folks lose site of the first step in that process - actually getting a user to click on the PPC ad!

Ian Cowley put together a fantastic list of 34 strong calls to action to strongly motivate people to do something - click on your ad, pick up the phone or purchase a product. I think many of them translate perfectly to the paid search marketplace.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

6. Feed your widget for less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
11. Relax. Reserving an exclusive widget is just a click away.
19. Find out how we’ve helped other businesses retain widgets.
27. Call today and find out what the widget man doesn’t want you to know.
30. Does your widget misbehave?
31. How can a new widget pay for itself in six months?

Developing PPC Ad Copy That Converts

All too often there are posts talking about increasing quality score by doing this or that to your pay per click ad copy. But, what about actually getting sales from your ad copy? Shimon Sandler has a fantastic post about doing just that through a "Unique Selling Proposition" and its ability to dramatically increase conversions.

The USP concept offers consumers something desirable & different than the competition. The challenge is getting your USP stated in so few characters. You’re limited to 95 characters on Google.

There are 3 general principles behind a USP - Unique, Selling, and Proposition.

A classic example of a USP message is the M&M’s slogan: “The milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand” [56 characters].

He goes into much more depth covering each section. Its a great read and very refreshing from the normal 'ad copy' posts.