Although it is only the start of July and schools will have just started to break up for summer holidays, it is a good time to start to think about back to school campaigns, since such a move will gain a lot of momentum in under a month. Back to school campaigns can be extremely successful, especially since there is always a wave of traffic, every year, that need to purchase gear and clothing for students.
With this, here are 5 tips for PPC advertisers and marketers to take into consideration with their advertising campaigns, to capitalize on the back to school movement.
 

#1 Moms Shop Online

For the majority of people shopping back to school, they will be moms. The general consensus with shopping back to school is that moms do this online, due to the convenience of not having to take a child to a shopping center. For this reason, when it comes to creating a PPC campaign, remember the target audience are specifically moms.
 

#2 Target 5pm-11pm

The general time that moms shop back to school clothing and gear is between finishing work and just before going to bed. This tends to be between 5pm to 11pm on week days – it is generally harder to put a time frame at the weekend, so it might be best to test times for the weekend to see what works best for you.
If you do target the time, then it is important to add geological targeting too. This will make sure that, no matter what timezone the web user is in, they will be viewing your advert between 5-11pm local time.
 

#3 Start the Campaign in July

The majority of campaigns for back to school start early-mid July, and ending mid-late September. However, when you start and finish it depends on how large a market you are targeting.
If you are targeting a specific area, it is useful to know the specific dates for that area the children break up and go back to school. If it is larger than that, then it is more beneficial to expand your campaign time, both ends, by 1-2 weeks, to accommodate the different times schools can break up and start again.
 

#4 Always Provide a Discount

Back to school shopping is something that the majority of people look to get everything as cheap as possible. For this reason, it is a great idea to provide some sort of discount, be it a discount code in the PPC search advert, to entice web users into clicking on the advert.
 

#5 Add Negative Keywords

What type of school you are targeting, with the age of the students, is vitally important. For example, if you are targeting just high schools, then all other ages need to be added to the negative keywords. This will save on your budget for traffic that will never convert for you.