Q: How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Holidays & Promotions Promotions Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion. Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same. Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below). Holiday Campaigns Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads: Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks. Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products. Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.) Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products. Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).

Question 1

When should I consider using Remarketing?

Accepted Answer

Hold off on remarketing in the beginning to test the quality of the traffic in the campaigns, and if a campaign isn’t performing well then you don’t want to limit the ad spend by pushing customers back.

Question 2

How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Accepted Answer

Holidays & Promotions

Promotions

Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion.
Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same.
Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below).

Holiday Campaigns

Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads:

Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks.
Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products.
Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.)
Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products.
Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).

Question 3

How do we rank for organic Google searches?

Accepted Answer

Make sure your website can rank organically
Continual content creation (unique and about one topic. Doesn’t have to be long, 600 words is fine.)
Buy backlinks with a company like seo.co

Question 4

What do you recommend for a new product launch?

Accepted Answer

If you are launching a new product, there are a few things we can do to get it out into the ad ecosystem.

First of all, if you add the product to your eCommerce store, then it will automatically be added to the Smart Shopping campaign through the product feed after a few days. However, depending on how large your store is, it could take the algorithm quite some time to give the new product ad spend and gather conversion data on it. If you want to speed that process up, we can give the product it's own campaign(s) to force the account to devote ad spend to it more quickly.

We can give it it's own budget and run the following campaigns:

Shopping (eventually the product will be switched over to the main Smart Shopping campaign once we are done with the "push")
GSP and Display - These work especially well with remarketing audiences of recent website visitors
YouTube - Do you have a video to promote the product? If so, we can try YouTube shopping to get eyes on it.
Search - Temporarily running a search campaign on a new product can help the ad account gather conversion data more quickly because it allows the algorithm to see what the ideal, target customer looks like.

Question 5

How do I access search terms report for Smart Shopping?

Accepted Answer

This report can only be accessed by sending a request to Google because the terms in the report don’t accurately represent the search terms that would be good to target.

Since Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning the algorithm shows the ad to the type of people they think might be likely to buy, rather than the keywords most closely related to the product), there are usually 70 million signals to decide to target that person, and their search term is just one of them.

Question 6

Is there any spillover from paid ads to organic search ranking?

Accepted Answer

On average, you will see about a 10 rank jump in organic search rank after you start running paid ads. Part of this is because Google counts all traffic to the website as “traffic.” Which means anyone who clicks on an ad gets points towards traffic. In Google Search Console (in the “Performance on Search Results” report) you can see organic search performance for the site. Compare the last 3 months with the previous 3 months to see the difference in average position, average CTR, total clicks, and total impressions.

Question 7

Last Steps Before We Launch Your PPC Campaign

Accepted Answer

After a campaign has been built, but before it launches, we like to schedule a time with you to review the campaign before it goes live. This is to ensure that your initials goals are being strategically implemented, and allows everyone who's a part of the process to voice any concerns.

Below you'll find a list of topics and items that we will be reviewing during our discussion. Once we have reviewed the campaign with you, made any changes needed and have received your full approval, the campaign will go live!

Ad Budget

While we're confident in our abilities to successfully deliver and manage PPC campaigns, but it never hurts to double check things, especially the budget.

Campaign Schedule

The campaign schedule is the time of day and days of the week that the campaign will run its advertisements.

This is important because you may want to receive traffic to your website during the night, but also want to have traffic, plus phone calls during the day.

Geography

It's important to make sure that we have the proper geographical settings in place prior to launch.

If you are a business that is running advertisements to people who live within a 25-mile radius of your physical location, it would be inappropriate to have your ads set to run outside of your targeted market area.

Structure

The structure of your campaign is essentially another way to refer to the overarching goal of the campaign.

For instance, someone who is running a campaign to maximize conversions defined by email signups will have a different campaign structure than someone who just wants drive clicks and traffic to their website.

Ad Copy

This is a crucial step because the ad copy is going to be the first experience a potential customer has with your business.

It's important that we have proper ad copy in place that is relevant to what you are offering on the other end of your advertisement. We also want to make sure that the ads are relevant to the keywords that they are attached to.

Relevant ad copy is something that shouldn't be overlooked because the higher the relevancy is to people searching on Google, the higher your ad's quality score.

A higher quality score can help in the bidding process to lower your Cost Per Click, increase your ad rank, and increase overall campaign performance.

Negative Keyword List

There is nothing negative about negative keywords. In fact, compiling a list of negative keywords is a great thing!

Negative keywords increase campaign performance because they eliminate a lot of bad traffic and irrelevant clicks.

For instance, say that you run a business that sells luxury jewelry. The last thing you would want is for people clicking on your ads who search for "cheap jewelry".

The person who is searching for "cheap jewelry" isn't likely to buy luxury jewelry, and if they click on your advertisement you get charged for that irrelevant click.

The great thing about negative keywords is that if we add "cheap" as a negative keyword, your ad will never show for people who use the word "cheap" in their search.

This, in turn, saves you money on the campaign that can be used for more relevant clicks.

Ad Groups

Ad groups contain a collection of advertisements and keywords that are relevant to the overall goal of the campaign.

For instance, if your company offers a wide variety of services, each ad group should reflect that service. This offers much more in the way of scalability and control when wanting to expand your marketing around those specific services.

Keywords

A keyword is essentially a word or phrase that people search for in Google.

Keywords are the beating heart of each campaign. If the keywords don't match with the products/services you're advertising, it can cause problems.

We also focus on keywords and keyphrases that generate the type of conversion you want. By adding keywords and key phrases to your campaign such as “buy”, “for sale”, “near me”, etc., we can generate a conversion much more frequently.

Bidding Strategy

There are a few types of bidding strategies that you can use in an AdWords campaign. Depending on your business goals, some bidding strategies will be better suited for you than others.

For instance, if your business is trying to maximize the number of clicks to the website, a "Maximize Clicks" bidding strategy might be best. If your business is trying to capture conversions at a specific cost, then "Target CPA" bids might be best in that scenario.

It's also important to keep in mind that as your campaigns evolve, the bidding strategy used will likely evolve along with it.

In Summary...

If for any reason we have left one of your questions unanswered, you can always request another campaign walk through!

Question 8

How should we prepare for the holiday season?

Accepted Answer

It's best to get a head-start on any promotions you are planning for big holiday seasons (like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.).

For Black Friday & Cyber Monday, specifically, we recommend chooseing a site-wide discount. Your competition will be fierce, so it's a good idea to choose as steep of a discount as possible. If you need to temporarily hit a higher ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) in order to make this discount profitable, then we can easily do that.

Make sure any promotion you are offering in Google Ads is also offered in your other marketing channels. It's best to keep things synergistically across all platforms.

If your business is eCommerce, then you are probably running shopping campaigns. Shopping ads can promote discounts, special offers, free gifts, etc. right on the ad.

We can also promote the special deal directly in the text of any search ads that are running.

It can also be beneficial to create some images to support the promotion. We'll use these in the display campaigns to remarket to folks who visit the website during this time periot. A square version and a 19:1 ratio would work best, but Google has a long list aspect ratios they support, so more sizes means we are eligible to appear in more placements and therefore give the algorithm more opportunities to show the ad.

Google and all other ad platforms always experience a large increase in traffic during November and December. It can be a good idea to be flexible with the budget around this time -- meaning, if the audience size suddenly increases dramatically, then we will likely be able to spend more on the ads while continuing to meet a high return.

Question 9

What are Cart Abandonment Campaigns and Cart Abandonment Audiences?

Accepted Answer

If you see significantly more product value being added to the cart than what is being purchased, consider adding a Cart Abandonment Audience to a Remarketing Campaign to try to get those hot leads back.

Use Display Ads so that any other websites they visit, like competitor sites, they will see your ad saying, “Finish your checkout and you’ll get 10% off with coupon code x”.

(***Make sure to only add new audiences to the Remarketing Campaign after the campaign has proven that the ROAS is there or else you will simply be putting budget & effort into something that converts at a negative net profit.)

Question 10

How To Share The Facebook Pixel with A Business

Accepted Answer

In order to share your Facebook pixel with a business, you will need to already have a business manager. If you don't already have one, you can set one up here.

Once you've done that, go to Business Manager Settings.

Next, go to “Pixels” under Data Sources.

Select the pixel and click “Assign Partners.”

Enter the Solutions 8 Business ID: 915738658498354