The months of May and June are prime time for PPC campaigns as we celebrate a flurry of holidays and big events. Last month our team discussed making the most of Mother’s Day ads and this month we focus on the double whammy of Father’s Day and Graduation season! This year, Father’s Day falls on June 17^th and will be celebrated on this day in the U.S, Canada, the U.K and France, opening up a vast opportunity for advertisers who wish to reach a wider audience and can ship internationally.

With over 70% of adults shopping online, and men’s online shopping surpassing women’s, it’s time that advertisers begin capitalizing on the potential for huge sales during holidays like Father’s Day. In 2011, the average spend for Father’s Day gifts was $106.49, up from $94.32 in 2010, and this number is expected to rise once more this year. Last year, about $1.4 billion was spent on gift cards, $653 million on sporting goods, $593 million on car accessories, $1.3 billion on electronics, and $1.4 billion on clothing – this year’s numbers are expected to increase. Now consider that 20% of all father’s day purchases are completed online – that’s a huge chunk of the pie that advertisers could miss out on without developing targeted Father’s Day ads and sales.

As for Graduation season, late May through early June is typically the peak of high school and college graduations with parents and family members trying to find the perfect gift for their grad. If you’re planning on developing a sale with lowered prices, why not get two for the price of 1 and target both dads and grads? With slight tweaks and targeting, you can focus on two popular seasonal markets.

Here are some tips to consider when optimizing your ad campaign for the Dads & Grads season:

1. Perform keyword research to accurately target your market with the most effective keywords.
2. Consider which of your products and services are most relevant to the holiday (i.e. home goods may be best targeted to high school grads going off to college or new college grads moving out on their own while sporting goods may be best for dads!).
3. Look at match types for your keywords. For the most popular electronic terms, the highest volume of impressions and clicks are coming from exact match.
4. Broad match can help you catch searches on variations of your keywords, thereby casting a wider net of possible visitors.
5. If offering a promotion, include the promo code directly in the ad copy or in a clearly marked space on the landing page.
6. Create seasonal ads with targeted, enticing copy for your Father’s Day/Grad sales.
7. Establish a time period: Ideally, having ads up by the last week in May would be best but there are plenty of shoppers looking for last minute deals. Be sure to have your end date established which can also help entice shoppers to act immediately rather than continuing to shop around.
8. Develop a great landing page: clear calls to action, identifiable sales and deals, easy to maneuver. Make sure visitors don’t fall off at this point by having an enticing landing page!

Sources:

http://community.microsoftadvertising.com/en/small-business/adcenter/b/advertiser/archive/2012/05/30/father-s-day-2012-tips-and-trends-for-adcenter-advertisers.aspx

http://switchedonmedia.com.au/blog/ppc-holiday-campaigns-set-up-tips/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/men-online-shopping_n_1475576.html

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/infographic-world-online-shopping/

When it comes to PPC advertising and Google Adwords, the one metric that will make or break your campaign is Quality Score (QS). Every single one of your keywords has its own Quality Score, so when you’re stuck with a low Quality Score problem and you’ve done everything you can to ensure relevancy between the landing page, ad copy, and keywords, then it’s usually easier to just increase your bids and move on to bigger and better keywords. In some cases, however, it is worth taking the time to troubleshoot a few of your keywords, especially when there’s potential for high conversion value.

In April 2012, Google updated the Quality Score dialog box with new Quality Score indicators: Expected clickthrough rate, Ad relevance, and Landing page experience. This dialog box is accessible by hovering your cursor over the dialog box icon in the status column, which pops up a tooltip that includes these indicators. While Google uses these factors and several more to determine your Quality Score, clickthrough rate is considered to be the most important factor—after all, if your ad is relevant to the targeted keyword, then a large percentage of those searchers should be clicking on your advertisement. But what do you do when both your CTR and your landing page are non-problematic, yet you’re still getting a low Quality Score?

With these aforementioned changes to Google’s Quality Score indicators, you can now discern whether or not your ad copy is what is causing your low Quality Score. For example, when you open up the dialog box of a low QS keyword, the ad relevance indicator might say, “Below average,” and now you know the low QS is most likely due to a perceived mismatch between the ad copy and the keyword.

Sometimes this perceived mismatch is not apparent to us and is only apparent to Google’s algorithms. Sometimes, even when you use keyword insertion, making your ad copy include the exact same keyword the searcher typed in, you are still presented with a low Quality Score. This is because there are other words besides the actual keyword itself that can affect the QS. Discovering and adding these semantically related keywords can boost your Quality Score in many situations. Today I’m going to show you 3 simple techniques to find semantically related keywords to include in your ad copy in order to fix your low Quality Scores issues.

1. The Tilde Operator

The tilde command is an advanced Google search operator that searches for synonyms of your keyword along with the actual keyword itself. You can tell what these synonyms are by looking at the bolded keywords on the search engine results page.

E.g. Your search query is: ~yacht

Some of the bolded keywords on the first couple of pages are: yacht, yachts, yachting, boats, boat, and sailing.

Now let’s take this one step further and add the same keyword, but as a negative search term.

E.g. Your search query is now: ~yacht -yacht

Now you can see ONLY the synonyms of the keyword “yacht.” Not only do you get to see terms that you may not have seen in your first search, but you also get an idea of which keywords Google considers to be the same as the keyword “yacht,” such as “yachts” and “yachting,” due to the fact that they haven’t shown up.

Now that you know the search terms that Google considers related to your keyword that are not the keyword itself, you can start making a list of keywords to consider including in your ad copy. Furthermore, you can string out your search query multiple times, each level giving you more and more related keywords.

E.g. ~yacht -yacht -boat –sail

Not only can this technique help you fix your low Quality Score, but it’s also great for SEO purposes and gives you insight into Google’s Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) for specific search terms.

2. Google Sets Feature in Google Docs

Google Sets was a Google Labs tool that was shut down in September 2011, but it is still available as a feature in Google Docs spreadsheets. In order to use the feature, simply type in 3-5 related keywords down one column, highlight them, and then Ctrl + drag the corner down to generate a list of related words. This is a great method to build a wide set of keywords for keyword research purposes, as well as for generating a list of related keywords for your ad copy troubleshooting.

3. Contextual Targeting Tool

With Google’s Contextual Targeting Tool in Adwords, you are able to generate related keywords by entering one or more seed keywords. Not only that, but the tool also generates these keywords and organizes them into themed ad groups.

While the tool is intended to be used to help you build display campaigns, it also provides another level of insight for finding what Google considers to be semantically related keywords—something that is especially important with new search terms that pop up which have not existed before, due to the fact that Google has less data to go off of. In cases like these, it may be beneficial to go ahead and check for what Google “knows” about a particular keyword because it’s still going to affect Quality Score if there’s a perceived lack of relevancy by the engine, even if we as humans can see that our ad is relevant to the keyword.

While it would be too time consuming to use these techniques for every single low Quality Score case, these are great options for making the most out of the current keywords in your Adwords campaigns and improving your QS by including semantically related keywords in the ad copy. Use all three methods in conjunction with each other rather than relying on any single one. By using all three methods, you’ll be able to find reoccurring keywords and patterns that will allow you to make better decisions about how you should change your ad and the direction you should take when creating fresh ad copy.

While most of us know that Mother’s Day is coming up on May 13^th, many advertisers don’t seem to take full advantage of this big day. Mother’s Day has become the second largest shopping holiday, with many people not only shopping for gifts for mothers but also wives (19.6%), daughters (9.6%), grandmothers (8.0%), sisters (8.4%), friends (7.3%), and godmothers (1.8%) as Allbusiness.com states. But advertisers not only forget to take these target audiences into consideration in their advertising strategy, but also don’t speak to the emotions that are surrounded by this holiday. Instead, they take ads that would usually be used to promote other holidays and replace the words “Christmas” and “Halloween” with “Mother’s Day”.  Moreover, they use phrases like: “Don’t forget it’s Mother’s Day” or “Mother’s Day Specials”. While most of us have a strong bond with our mom, we also want to give her a gift that emotionally connects us with her and that shows her how much we really love her. Therefore, the advertising strategy needs to tap into the emotions of the customers and promote the product as the emotional bond between the customer and the recipient.

So what should you consider including for an effective advertising strategy for Mother’s Day?

Gift Suggestions: Create a Mother’s Day category on your website with gift suggestions to help buyers decide on how to show their love. These suggestions should include the bestselling products for women, Mother’s Day specials etc.

Upselling, Cross-selling & Bundles: It can be hard to sell additional products or services to your customers when they are only looking for one certain product/service on your website. Therefore, you should use emotional holidays like Mother’s Day to promote higher priced items and combine products/services to one special offer. You never know, those ideas may become customer favorites and a bestseller, not only on holidays.

Timing: While most retailers don’t get their Mother’s Day promotions up and running until two weeks before the big day, you can use this time to get the attention of buyers, using gift suggestions, incentives, contests and giveaways.

Contests and giveaways: In these times of social media, it is relatively easy to promote contests for free products or service giveaways via Facebook, Google+, Twitter as well as on your website. Ask people to write a short story about their mothers, wives, sisters, grandmothers, etc. and explain why they deserve to be appreciated on that day above everybody else. With potential buyers sharing contests and giveaways with their social network, your company will get some welcomed and (virtually) free exposure.

E-mail: Focus your email marketing/newsletter on Mother’s Day – include ideas of how the reader can make their Mom feel special and how your products or services can be of help in doing this. If you know your email recipients’ demographics, you can also send out specifically targeted offers such as: “How [Your Company Name] can help make your Mom feel special!” And don’t forget to highlight other fun and interesting things to do on Mother’s Day so your readers can surprise their Moms.

Partner with other businesses or applications: Include a link or application on your website, social media, and newsletter to help your customers create an ecard or let them write a short story that they can send to their special someone on Mother’s Day. Think about partnering with daily deal companies, like Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. to offer discounts on your product offerings.

If you have a local store, partner with other local businesses to create a special deal that attracts customers to shop your store and create advertisements in the local newspaper that highlight “How to Celebrate Mom”.

Get customer’s opinions: Conduct an online survey or use your social media channels to get ideas on what customers would like as Mother’s Day gifts. Combine it with a giveaway or contest and you will get an additional opportunity to collect customer information you could use for your newsletter list.

Common Theme:  Implement a common Mother’s Day theme in all your online channels as well as your offline Marketing efforts. Make sure that people know that you are offering a Mother’s Day special or specific gift ideas for Mother’s Day on your website. Don’t make them have to click through your whole website to find the information they want.

Pay attention to the audience: As mentioned above, customers are not only looking for gifts for their mom but also their wives, sisters, grandmothers etc. Be sure to have specific ad copy written to all these audiences and don’t just take the easy way out with replacing other holiday ad copy with “Mother’s Day”. Also don’t forget about the Mom’s themselves. While they might hope that they get the gift they deserve, they will also search for ideas on how to best treat themselves. So create advertisements specifically targeted to the Mom’s in the audience and use their special interest sites to do so, ie Pinterest, Blogs etc.

Last minute buyers:  Depending on which stage of the buying cycle the customer is in, advertising should be coordinated to these stages. A last minute buyer is certainly looking for a gift idea, he/she can purchase right away. Special deals and offers will help to make the decision for him/her in your favor. Also be aware where buyers are looking for ideas. As last minute customers don’t have much time to research ideas, think about advertising on daily deal websites.

Display efforts:  Use the Display Network to get the attention of your buyers with emotionally designed image ads. Advertisers should also use the opportunities of a Remarketing campaign. Not only can they follow their visitors around the net to keep a permanent presence with them. But they can focus on special promotions to catch the eye of the customer on other websites.

While Mother’s Day is a great opportunity to say thank you to your mom’s, advertising efforts should be aimed at establishing a continuous relationship with these customers year-round. Let the emotions speak to separate your efforts from the usual Mother’s Day advertising crowd.

What are your experiences? What advertising efforts were most successful for you? Let us know in the comment section below.