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Studying Historical PPC Ad Trends to Optimize Your Seasonal Ad Campaigns

Zey Gutierrez

October 06, 2008

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Nowadays, a lot of online businesses rely heavily on certain seasons for increased sales volume. As of this writing, the month of September for most industries indicate a significant time for sales --- it’s back-to-school in the US; it’s the early start of Halloween and Christmas preparation for Christian nations; it’s the beginning of vacation booking for some travel enthusiasts. If you are an online marketer that could benefit from such events, then you might just want to invest on the trend when the demand is in full bloom, because if you’re not prepared as a seasonal marketer, you will not reap the fruits of a demanding market during this buying season.

Research and well-tested ad campaign techniques are keys to handling seasonal activities in the online market. So when seasonal advertising time is approaching, you should be equipped with the knowledge of knowing the profitable keywords from related websites around a month before the season.

For example, you are planning to sell gift items this coming Christmas such as jewelry, clothes, perfume and toys. You should do a research of shopping sites, such as buy.com, Amazon and ebay.com, and determine their high-paying keywords. Competitive intelligence tools such as KeywordSpy.com can be a big help in this marketing pursuit. It can gather keywords of marketers in all types of industries and allow you to get good ideas on keyword advertising.  You can also check its Time Machine feature, this KeywordSpy thing lets you look at keywords other advertisers have used in the past.

 So based on our first example, you may look for Christmas-oriented sites in KeywordSpy Time Machine and check their November and December 2007 keywords and ad copies, then see for yourself the keyword advertising strategies which will be helpful in your own site campaign on December 2008.

In short, if your business has various high points throughout the year, try to review the past promotional and marketing campaigns of your industry so you can improve your next target season. I really suggest that you give the Time Machine a shot. This is the only keyword tool feature that I have seen giving months’ worth of advertising information. Would you believe, I found out through KeywordSpy Time Machine that divorce sites such as Divorcesyourself.com boost their advertising during months of February and March? Perhaps this can be credited to the fact that the Valentines madness is in the air during these months, and divorce sites are targeting the emotional spots of “attached people”,  by subtly suggesting that they should prioritize their need for divorce to be with their “true love.” So, how is that for an advertising gold mine if you are in the “divorce industry”? You can simply copy the keywords and improve the ad copies of well-performing divorce sites in certain periods and months.

Whoever said that “moving forward” is the best thing to do in this world” is simply not always right especially in this case. Cause in the world of seasonal advertising, it is good to “look backwards” and review the good and bad in the past season, for you to cherry-pick and carry the good ones in the next.

The theory is the same when choosing your keyword and ad copies for your targeted seasons, learn from the sites that did well in the past and enhance what they’ve got. With this, we might just believe in the saying: “It’s always good to learn from the experts.”

Happy selling and have a fruitful season!

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