Paid Search (PPC) Content Optimising your PPC for bank holidays May 23rd, 2019 One of the most important things that businesses must consider when it comes to their digital strategy is the impact that public and bank holidays can have on their operation With a recent flurry of bank holidays, we thought we’d pick the brains of our paid search (PPC) experts and find out some top tips to ensure your PPC runs effectively. What is paid search (PPC)? PPC is the model of internet marketing whereby you pay a fee every time your ad is clicked on by a potential customer. Placing a PPC advert that correlates with a specific search can help expose your offering to a relevant audience, driving highly targeted traffic to your website. This exposure improves if the ad follows best practice and goes to the correct landing page, if it has unique, well written content. If this is the case you should be able to climb the paid results on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Think about optimisation There are many ways to optimise a paid search campaign and these are the most useful to remember. Think about the channel and your key performance indicators (KPIs) – There are so many different channels you can use to house your ads, when you are advertising in multiple channels or campaigns, it’s important to see which channel is performing best for your primary KPI. Writing effective ad copy with a compelling call to action of course is key, and Google now offers advertisers more control over this than ever. The optimisation that comes into play with expanded text ads is vast and in truth one of the most important areas of paid search to consider. Expanded text ads are deemed as the next generation of text ads. With so much focus on the way search marketing has transferred from desktop to mobile, Google decided that it had to change in order to reflect this whilst keeping both parties – the users and the advertisers in mind. They give advertisers additional control over their messaging, and provide users with more information before they click on an ad. Like text ads, expanded text ads are available on both the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network (GDN), and are supported by all the Google Ads tools that currently support text ads. Further to this our team suggested: Review which keywords are relevant to your offer: If it’s site wide, then you can potentially create new ads across your whole account. Otherwise, ensure you only create ads for relevant keywords. Maximise your coverage across ad extensions: Whilst your offer might not be applicable across every ad extension type, ensuring that you have your offer across all relevant ad extensions can help maximise coverage. Promotion extensions are the newest ad extension type (added last year), that are a great way of getting your promotions across during offer periods. Think about shopping: for eCommerce sites, the type of offer needs to be considered more. If it is just a price reduction for certain products, make sure the “sale price” attribute is up to date in your product feed. if there is a promotion applied at the basket stage (multi-buy offer or code), then set up Merchant Center Promotions. Also remember to use promo codes because sale price doesn’t always have messaging that shows it’s a sale price and can sometimes just be a change of the original price. Turning automated bidding off: advised by Google to switch this off so that performance can be maximised. Remember day-parting: not every business does well over bank holiday for example B2B/Lead Gen so ask if the account need pulling pack or even pausing? Consider display: get further reach for any offers etc (remarketing and new user focused awareness). We’ve put together a series of eBooks that will take you from zero to hero in paid search, taking you through through each facet of PPC to ensure your brand is making the most of its budget. ‘PPC Uncovered – An Advanced Guide to Paid Search (PPC)’ features four chapters: Strategy Analytics and Measurabilty Tech, Tools and Data Creativity Download the series for free today to start learning.