3 effective ways to drive additional revenue with PPC in the January sales

Some of the best ways to drive additional revenue in the January sales is to ensure that your sales are well advertised. The more people aware of your sale, the more people will take advantage of it! Here are 3 effective ways to promote your January offers using PPC…

Push promotions using Sitelink Extensions and Product Listing Ads (PLA)

1. As well as advertising your offer in your ad headline or description text, why not try adding info about your offer to the text for your sitelink extension.

2. If you are running multiple sales at the same time, have the primary offer in your main ad and other offers in sitelinks.

This promotes your sales and allows users to click through to the page containing the sale most relevant to them. You can have up to six sitelinks displaying at once, if your ad rank is high enough, so you can advertise the offers on your highest value/best-selling products as well as your general sale message.

Another way to advertise your seasonal promotions is via a Product Listing Campaign. Product Listing Campaigns are already very eye-catching, as the images can stand out on a text-dominated search results page. We find Product Listing Campaigns have a conversion rate 13% higher than standard search campaigns.

On your product listing ad you have up to 45 characters of ad text to promote your sale so make sure to outline your offer in this text,  but also make it relevant to the product being advertised. Do not, for example, advertise 20% off all dresses in an ad for shoes!

Create your ads in advance

Another useful practice is to create your ads in advance and set them to launch automatically as soon as your sale starts. If you are running a sale that starts 00:01 on Monday you should wait until 9am when you are in the office to set your sales ads live. This can easily be scheduled in AdWords.

1. Once you’ve created your sale ads, upload them as paused. If you want new ads after the sale, upload your post-sale ads as paused as well.

2. The next step is to label your Pre-Sale, Sale and Post-Sale ads. Labels will also help with reporting on performance after your sale.

3. Schedule your ads to change when your sale does. You can set your ads to come live using an ‘Enable ads when…’ automated rule and pause your ads using a ‘Pause ads when …’ automated rule.

 Utilising this functionality is a great way to ensure you are displaying your sale ads for the whole of your promotion and that they end when your promotion does.

Modify your bids for peak times

Ad scheduling can be an extremely valuable tool; very few businesses will find that their conversion rate and ROI is consistent throughout the course of the day and week. There tends to be peak times when demand is highest and other times where it is relatively quiet. Ad scheduling helps you take advantage of this.

1. The first thing to do is to find out when your peak times are. You will need to consider conversion rate, ROI, Per Visit Value as well as Visit and Transaction volume.

2. Once you know your peaks and troughs you can take advantage by setting positive and negative bid modifiers.

3. You will need to adjust the Ad schedule in your campaign settings. Remember you can only have a maximum of 6 parts in a single day.

4. Once you have the day split into parts you can add your bid modifiers to each period.

Increasing bids at strategic points in the day can be lucrative, but spending more without making cuts elsewhere could affect your budget. Don’t overspend during peak sales and deplete your budget so its runs out a before the end of the day or month.