How to keep the momentum going with your paid search strategy, long after the last of the turkey has been finished.
Every year, following the festive celebrations you may see a dip in traffic and sales. Let’s face it. We’re all spent out. But even when the temptation of sales is waning, is there a way to keep that momentum going on your site to make sure your sales don’t fall dramatically following the holiday season?
Here are 5 top tips to help you keep sales supercharged after the holiday hype, and some additional knowledge from the paid search experts at ClickThrough Marketing on how to implement these tactics.
Tidy up your AdWords account.
It isn’t spring quite yet, but it’s a great time of year for a spring clean. Most likely you saw increased spend over the festive period, so you will have seen a lot of new search terms appearing in your account that you might not have matched for previously.
We recommend reviewing these and excluding irrelevant search queries and adding high performing search queries as an exact match keyword. This will chip away the unnecessary keywords clogging up your account and make way for those that are pulling in sales.
Take advantage of remarketing.
You may have seen an increase in new users landing on your website over Christmas, but they may not have necessarily converted. Don’t give up! Make the most of this new audience and remarket to them across various channels such as search, social media and display.
Where they didn’t convert over the holidays, they will certainly be more familiar with your brand, and hopefully, start moving closer and closer to the bottom of your marketing funnel.
Test some fresh messaging.
Get creative and test some new quirky messaging this New Year using the Ad Variation tool in AdWords. Before you start, set yourself an objective. What do you want to gain from ad testing?
The success of your ads could be monitored by click through rate (CTR) proving that your ads are increasing engagement with your audience. But remember to factor in cost per conversion too as this will give a true indication of how your new ads could affect your bottom line. Setting these specific KPIs will ensure you get the most out of your ad tests.
Need some inspiration on which elements to test? We recommend testing the following:
- Add varying calls to action
- Add sitelinks using educational pieces of content from your newsfeed or blog
- Change up your headlines
- Test varying image creative
Test countdown ads if you have a January sale ending soon!
Remember to test in isolation, using one variation with multiple ad copies. And don’t forget to change one element at a time to see which yields the best results.
Target that New Year frame of mind.
Is your product or service a potential New Year’s resolution? If you are selling a product or service related to fitness, health, wellbeing, travel, or cost savings, take advantage of the fact that the consumer’s mindset will have changed dramatically come January. Now is the time to cater for those New Year shoppers.
Don’t be afraid to increase spend. If existing customers are ready and willing to get a jumpstart on their resolutions, increasing spend could be a straightforward way of increasing sales. At a time of year when many brands slow right down, amp up your spend and target the New Year shoppers with gusto.
Take stock and evaluate.
January is always a good time of year to recap what worked well or not last year. Did you set any objectives last year? Have these been met? Did you create a forecast? How did you perform against it?
Now is an excellent time to step back and evaluate what worked well and what didn’t work so well as part of your 2017 strategy. You can take those findings and build a better 2018 strategy that works to your strengths.
Set yourself some strategic objectives to test new channels and make sure you’re ahead of the trends. Take a look at our 2018 digital marketing predictions to make sure you’re on top of impending advances in digital!
Want to build an e-commerce ROI forecast for your paid search strategy in 2018? Check out our blog on implementing a strategic annual forecast, helping you to boost conversions this year.
