Leverage your promos with paid search

I have now been work­ing in search for many years and when I look at some of my col­leagues work­ing in oth­er mar­ket­ing chan­nels, I can real­ly see how search is much more agile and respon­sive when it comes to sup­port­ing mar­ket­ing promos!

So I thought it would be ben­e­fi­cial to the mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ty to share some of my best prac­tices and insights when sup­port­ing pro­mos through paid search.

  1. Brand terms

When cus­tomers knock at your door, make sure to use that oppor­tu­ni­ty to show your best dis­counts in front of them. That means bid­ding high on all your brand key­words (com­pa­ny name, prod­uct name, etc) – Do not let your com­peti­tors out­bid you.

In the ad copy ensure that the dis­count is high­light­ed with a) some good call to action, b) pro­mo percentage/price, and c) the end date — to cre­ate some sort of urgency (you can also use a count­down).

https://blog.adobe.com/media_e737d6176a167cf699e68583e792a1b5f4080347.gif

  1. Non-brand terms

Pro­mos are not only great to increase your sales imme­di­ate­ly but also to increase your prospect base. By non-brand, I mean all key­words that do not con­tain your brand or prod­uct names.

Be gener­ic in your ads and assume that your prospects might not be aware of your brands/products — so focus on the dis­count and oth­er com­pet­i­tive advan­tages like free deliv­ery, etc.

You may also want to use match type dis­tri­b­u­tion tac­tic (watch here a key­word match types tuto­r­i­al), tar­get your top geo mar­kets and start with a low budget/bids and adjust that as the cam­paign progresses.

  1. Land­ing page

Might sound obvi­ous, but do ensure that you send your cus­tomers to the cor­rect land­ing page that high­lights the pro­mo. Addi­tion­al­ly, you can run A/B test on the land­ing page using dif­fer­ent con­tent. Look at some of the top best prac­tices here.

  1. Retar­get­ing

Did you know you could tar­get cus­tomers who almost com­plet­ed a pur­chase through paid search? Paid search is not only made of key­words and ad copies, but also audi­ences, cus­tomer pro­files. By com­bin­ing first par­ty data (your web­site: vis­its, CRM data) and third par­ty data (Google), you can cre­ate very spe­cif­ic audi­ences. This is the future of search and you have to be in there. Reach out to your Google rep­re­sen­ta­tive and your web depart­ment to imple­ment this.

  1. Bud­get strategy

Hold back some bud­get before the pro­mo starts and increase the spend aggres­sive­ly when it goes live. Make sure you spend more dur­ing the hot peak time (depend­ing on the nature of your busi­ness, but most of the time dur­ing work­ing hours) and mon­i­tor your cam­paigns close­ly on a dai­ly basis.

Final­ly, let’s have a bit of fun through this video, made by my Adobe US search peers.