Holiday Shopping PPC Tactics- Retargeting Ideas to Boost Sales for Holiday PPC Reply

holiday search, PPC, PPC strategy, search engine marketing • Tags: , , ,

Retargeted advertising is not new, but kicking off a program now for this online holiday shopping season can help to boost sales. Retargeting reaches people who have visited your site by serving an ad to them post-visit on other content sites across the web. Advertisers do this by putting a small piece of code on their site which sets a “cookie” in the user’s browser.  As the user surfs the web and visits other sites that serve retargeted advertising, those sites will check for the cookie and use it to determine which ads to display.

This tactic is usually very effective because the user is receiving multiple marketing touches and keeps your brand top of mind. They also tend to be more qualified because they have already expressed interest in your products by having previously visited your website.

Ready for some killer tips?

1- Abandoned shopping cart: One approach ecommerce retailers can use this holiday season is the “abandoned shopping cart” tactic. This is accomplished by putting the retargeting cookie code on the shopping cart pages only. Anyone who has seen the cart pages, must have added an item to the cart at some point, right? As they surf the web, you can serve them with an ad that acts a gentle reminder to revisit your store. You don’t want to acknowledge you know they left the shopping cart, because, well, that’s just creepy.

You can, however, reinforce your current special offers like “free shipping” or promote your holiday gift products in hopes they will return to complete the purchase.

2- Loyalty: Another popular approach is the “loyalty” tactic. This reaches customers who have completed a transaction on your site (code added to the confirmation page code). You can use this to cross-sell or up-sell to recent buyers. None of the data collected is personally identifiable, so you’ll need to understand your customer behavior and their repeat purchase patterns to design the most effective “loyalty” campaign.

3- Reach: Each network serves ads on different networks, so you can market on multiple networks to reach your prospects wherever they are. Fetchback, serves display ads only across their partner ad network. Google and Yahoo also have retargeting programs. Google’s program targets prospects on the Google content network, while Yahoo’s targets on Yahoo properties. By combining the display retargeting network with Google retargeting and Yahoo’s retargeting product, you will have have a great deal of saturation and reach!

These three tips are a strong complement to your current PPC search engine text ads and provide a power-packed holiday strategy you can start today.

Resources:

Yahoo Retargeting (display banners)
http://advertising.yahoo.com/media-kit/retargeting.html
Google Remarketing (text + display banners)
www.google.com/ads/innovations/remarketing.html

Fetchback Retargeting (display banners)
http://www.fetchback.com/retargeting.html

My session at SMX East: It’s Not Multichannel Marketing If You Don’t Include Search Reply

PPC, PPC strategy, search engine marketing • Tags: , , ,

Below is the transcript and slides from my presentation at SMX East. The other panelists were Daina Middleton, CEO, Performics and Hamid Saify, Search Marketing Director, Deutsch LA. Their presentations dug deeper into the topic as well as shared some great case studies further illustrating how search can be integrated into the marketing mix.

It’s Not Multichannel Marketing If You Don’t Include Search

Have you noticed search is often not integrated into marketing plans and sometimes completely overlooked? We are missing opportunities that can be leveraged from search.

I outlined 5 best practices to integrating search into the marketing mix.
And 4 killer tactics you can take back to work and implement right away.

Many of the examples are for retail business, but these best practices and tactics can be used for services or B to B as well.

Best Practice #1: Goals
Search should be included in the overall strategic goals at the highest levels of the marketing plan.
Search can actually help to define the overall marketing initiatives because its one of the few channels that can reach people at all stages of the buying funnel.

While search strategy supports the overall marketing plan, you may also need unique channel level goals, for example, capturing email signups for a brand plan.

Best Practice #2: Listen
Listen to what people want- this is what they search for- apply this to overall marketing plan and other media initiatives.
The keywords they use to describe your product and the sites they visit on content will help you to build a stronger profile of your audience.

Say you sell an eco-friendly product. Do people search for “Eco” or “green”? Knowing this will help to better target your marketing.

You can find this data by:

  • Use query and placement reports to see what people are actually searching for to reach your site.
  • Use impressions and search traffic tools to gauge query volume.
  • Assisted keyword and assisted impression reports show  keywords that contributed to a conversion, but were not directly responsible for the sale.

Best Practice #3: Creative
Creative should be consistent across channels, but it should also be appropriate for individual channel and the buying funnel stage.

Review your creative for consistency:

  • Look/feel
  • Should use same messaging
  • Reflect the current promotion

I searched for old navy, the ad copy is exactly the same for every single keyword search!

Their ad promotes the $7 flat rate shipping, even though they’re having a huge 40% off end of the season sale and a seasonal promo.

More…

My PPC Workshop at MIMA Summit 2010 Reply

PPC, PPC strategy, search engine marketing • Tags: , , ,

The MIMA Summit 2010 was a great success with intensive workshops on Monday 9-27 and breakout sessions the next day. Here is more info and the presentation from the workshop I led on PPC optimization. Check it!

Improve your paid search programs performance to increase the bottom-line!

Pay-per-click (PPC) has become inte­gral to a suc­cess­ful online mar­ket­ing strat­egy, but you can’t “set it and forget it.” Lisa will share tips to opti­mize paid search ads on Google, Facebook, and Bing/Yahoo, and show you how to take advan­tage of the options to max­i­mize your campaign’s impact.

What Does It Mean?

  • Taking it to the next level with these optimizations
  • Manage PPC daily
  • Small optimizations can make a big difference- test!
  • Experiment with new features
  • Analyze results across systems (PPC, analytics, sales data) and take action