PPC - Pay Per Click Management

It’s that time of year when you start to notice more and more adverts talking about Christmas. Like I have already said in one of my previous articles, Q4, particularly around Christmas, is the time of year most businesses make their money because everyone is buying each other Christmas gifts. Therefore, I was not surprised when I typed into Google search UK ‘christmas presents’ that the maximum of three adverts appeared directly above the organic results. For this reason, I thought it would be a good idea to analyse the adverts that appeared for the above search phrase to see how they adapted their search text adverts for Christmas which hopefully you can implement into your Christmas campaigns too.

So here is a screenshot of the results for ‘christmas presents’:

One thing to point out is that these screenshots I take of adverts ignore the adverts in the right hand sidebar of Google search results (such as on this article too about analysing HP’s PPC campaign). The adverts to the right hand sidebar are campaigns which have a lower CPC because the location is generally one with a lower CTR than the adverts I’m showing in the above image.

The first thing I noticed about the above adverts is the fact that they each have at least two keywords in each of their titles. Saying this, I typed ‘presents’ in and ‘gifts’ comes up bold? This is because Google also categorises words together so that if they are similar, Google will still make it bold. For example, if you types in ‘buy road vehicle’, I am sure ‘car’ in the PPC text adverts will be highlighted in bold too. This brings the point forward that make sure you have words in your advert that have more than one way of saying it. This means there is more chance that if the user searches for a synonym of your name, your word related to their search will still come up bold – the more bold your advert, the more the web user will notice it and up goes your CTR.

Another thing to point out with the above adverts is the vagueness of the adverts content. There is the exception of Alexander and James’s advert which is based on buying whisky for Christmas (this may have been related to what I had previously searched on Google: contextuality is everything!). With the other two adverts, they do not specifically tell the web user exactly what they are offering as gifts. The idea is to make sure they know that once the web user clicks on the advert, the advertiser knows that the web user wants to buy a Christmas gift but is unsure what type of gift yet. By including ‘unusual’, ‘unique’ and ‘1000s of fun Christmas ideas’ gives the web user the incentive to go onto their landing pages since they are bound to find a Christmas gift for someone out of thousands of items.

To sum up, if you have created a Christmas campaign:

• Include Christmas (of course!) and words that have many synonyms to things related to Christmas (or your campaign’s contents) to make more of your advert bold.
• Keep your advert vague. If you do this, you need to give the web user many options on your landing page such as Amazon have done with their homepage.