Guest Post: Seven ways to hone your PPC strategy

With summer arriving and ‘last minute holiday’ searches rising, now’s the time to start thinking about your PPC strategy.

By Ahmed Chopdat, account director at Circus PPC

With summer arriving and ‘last minute holiday’ searches rising, now’s the time to start thinking about your PPC strategy.

Most businesses, regardless of industry, will be subject to some level of holiday seasonality, so it is important to consider steps for preparation to ensure you capture the market at the right time.

Data from the past 5 years shows the search term ‘last minute holidays’ increases from April and peaks in late July/early August (Google Trends). If left until July/August to start implementing changes, you may have already missed the market.

Here are our top tips for your PPC strategy:

1. Don’t forget to cover all areas of the purchase funnel

Using a combination of both head and long-tail keywords will help connect with customers across all stages of the buying process; many people at the top of the funnel know they want a holiday but may not have chosen a destination yet, so it is important to bear this in mind when adding keywords.

2. Choose your keywords carefully to drive traffic

Adding high-volume keywords will increase the chances of your ad being seen but ensure that you set your bids and budgets appropriately and optimise frequently.

Here are some of the most popular search terms surrounding ‘last minute holidays’ from Google’s Keyword Planner.

3. Avoid using ‘last click’ on the attribution model

It’s easy to only credit the final click or step a customer makes when purchasing, but it’s also important to remember the journey they have been on to get there. Last minute holidays often require lots of research before buying and this can mean multiple touch points. Credit those touch points appropriately so that you don’t risk turning off keywords that were effective during those valuable early stages of the research cycle!

4. Remarketing

Customers are not always going to book during the first visit. Remarketing can be a great way to keep your brand in the minds of those still deciding. Reconnecting with these customers can increase brand recall and potentially lead to more bookings.

5. Set up call tracking to record offline sales

Telephone calls can sometimes be the main or only method for a customer to book a holiday, so call tracking is a useful way to effectively record performance. Using Google Website Call Forwarding is a simple method with no additional costs involved. There are also other third party solutions that you can pay for, such as Infinity and Response Tap, if you need something more sophisticated.

6. Keep your ads specific to the ‘last minute’ theme

Including your USPs and using ad copy relevant to your keywords will reinforce the message you are sending to the user. Be sure to use the best landing pages to reflect late holiday deals in order to help improve your quality score and provide the best experience for the user.

7. Use ad extensions to provide more information

Sitelinks, Callouts and Structured Snippets will not only make your ad bigger and more likely to be noticed but also give you the opportunity to detail other specific information surrounding late holiday deals, such as destinations, prices, ATOL protection, etc.

Don’t wait until the last minute to start making changes to your account! Acting early will enable you to engage with a wider range of last minute holiday shoppers. Hope this has given you some ideas as to how you can prepare. Please get in touch if you would like help devising a late holiday PPC strategy.

For more information on how we helped a travel business increase leads by 99% whilst decreasing cost-per-lead by 29%, please read our Shanti Travel Case Study.