6 PPC Tips for Advertising During a Global Crisis
1). Delve into Search Trends for Your Niche
Google Trends is one hugely underutilised tool many users never even heard of before. If you run a business with considerable online presence, a constant research into your niche is a must.
Google Trends gives you insight into the popularity of searches for different locations and languages. It shows search volumes together with trending graphs over time.
If you type in “running shoes” into the search box, you will see how this term is trending over time for a given country. That’s the first step. If you then look at the table below the graph, you will discover related searches and searches that are just breaking out into the world. You will have a first insight into what products interest users right now.
Looking deeper at my data for “running shoes”, I discovered that “comfort” is a topic that is currently rising in popularity. This suggests that people may be looking for comfortable running shoes. Given the current situation, this makes a lot of sense as people are undergoing a major lifestyle change. That together with changing priorities – comfort over style – is a great starting point at deciding what stock to focus on promoting. What’s more, it can feed fresh ad messaging ideas.
Still unsure? Below is a list of data you can uncover via Google Trends:
- Search volumes and interest over time
- Interest by subregion
- Popularity of a search term by Network (Shopping, YouTube, etc)
- Top Related queries & queries rising in popularity
- Related topics
- and more
Lastly, these sectors that may seem like the worst affected industries, need to concentrate on new trends research:
- Fashion (have comfort / lightweight / all-in-one stock to shift?)
- Hospitality (can you transition into food delivery service?)
- Travel (video based tours of your signature locations; travel inspired online portals)
2). Don’t Withdraw Your Advertising Budget
Stopped all paid advertising for your business? Think you are not a recession-proof sector right now? Think again, as you may be missing out on opportunities.
Crisis stricken landscape of ppc digital advertising is a volatile space, but that does not necessarily mean a bad thing.
Many large companies still struggle to adjust to the new situation as they lay-off their staff, plan across all departments and cut down their overheads (advertising budget).
This is where small to medium businesses can enjoy higher impression share and CTRs at lower cost.
If you have had a ppc strategy in place with active google ads for the last 3 months, you must have already seen significant changes in your account.
Which campaigns lost traction? Which have got a lift in the conversions? Answers to these questions will help you make better budget decisions. Be sure to invest more in your currently top performing campaigns.
Additionally, recognise campaigns with unused budget and shift it towards products that have a higher relevance during this unprecedented period.
3). Evaluate Your Value Proposition
You may be selling a service or product that can help fill the demand gap caused by pandemic. If you can fit your offering into the following categories, you may be on track towards great results.
- remote working or home learning
- family / work related communication
- home entertainment
- essential services
- virtual / distance parties
- online guides for home exercise /cleaning / cooking
- gifting
Evaluate your current ads and rewrite them by adding an emphasis on your NEW unique selling points. Fast & free deliveries, incentives to home bound, time rich users, solutions to their everyday challenges will all be welcomed with a sale or lead.
4). Maximise ROI with Ad Extensions
Ad Extensions are rarely mentioned when talking about ppc tips and tactics. There are many types of ad extensions and if you haven’t yet paid attention to them, now is the time to do it.
Here’s why?
- Improve the quality of your ads by adding more relevant information
- Increase your ads’ real estate (although not guaranteed, and where relevant)
- Lift CTRs
During the time where you may struggle to communicate your fresh marketing messages inside a single text ad, ad extensions solve this problem. Your revamped promotional copy can include:
- Callouts of up to 15 characters long
- Sitelinks with a header and 2 Sub-headers
- Promo extension (percentage or money-off offer, limited time etc)
- Price extension (for easy pricing reference & comparison)
All the above are perfect tools to enhance your new ppc strategy, that caters for new behavioural changes in your audience’s routines.
5). Uncover New Relevant Searches
As 20-30{8e70974195c48f015656ec00029c2bf559b83ca472845d96d7b604466648386d} of daily searches on Google are completely new terms, campaigns may quickly become less effective simply by going “out-of-date”. This trend is even more prevalent during a global crisis we have now.
And to be able to tap into the opportunities of this ever changing paid advertising landscape, we need a new approach to how we go about keyword targeting
Here are two ppc tactics to consider.
Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) use websites’ Google index to pull a landing page that best matches the user’s query.
By enabling DSA in your campaigns, you are able to advertise for keywords you haven’t yet physically included in your account. DSA is a fantastic way to present your product or service to completely new, yet highly qualified traffic.
Dynamic Search Terms Report
After running your dynamic search ads for a while, you will gain access to a dynamic search term report. This report will allow you to dig into valuable data of exactly what new search keywords your ads were shown. You will see terms you probably wouldn’t have otherwise thought of including.
No ppc expert would have anyway, as the dynamic search terms are often emerging queries – new to advertisers and Google itself.
Also, it will give a landing page match and all the key metrics like clicks, CPC, conversions and more.
Need help setting DSA in your account? Contact our friendly ppc ninja now.
6). Leverage Competitors’ Hard Work
Wish you had knowledge and resources of top brands out there to conquer the complex task of ppc advertising? There are ways to tap into that knowledge you know.
How? Use Display / YouTube campaigns as leading campaigns to be discovered by audiences curated by competing brands.
With Google platform you can target to two types of audiences
- Custom audiences
- In-market audiences
Custom audiences are audiences that you can define by adding certain differentiators like urls visited,which allows to add a list of competitors urls. This then generates an audience who have interacted with competitors’ website – meaning, competitors have likely done the hard work and moved this group down the purchasing funnel. You are able to jump in with your unique offering and secure an easier sale.
In-market audiences are audiences who have not previously visited your site but are actively searching for products that you sell. This type of audience is curated by Google based on their online behaviour, also, what sites (competitors) they have visited. Boom!
Need support in implementing some of those ppc tips for your business? Don’t hesitate to let us know and we will assist you with any questions you may have.
