I love it when a PPC Plan comes together!
Planning is the key to all good business ideas. PPC is no different and planning differently for daily, weekly, monthly and seasonal changes in traffic can reap fantastic rewards. Every business has different busy and quiet periods but knowing when these are and reacting prior to the events can make a huge difference in the success of a pay per click campaign.
Daily and weekly planning of a campaign is down to looking at your weeks traffic trends. Different businesses will command different trends of traffic but by utilising Google Analytics or any other traffic reporting software it should be fairly easy to spot a consistent flow of traffic on certain days. A well planned PPC campaign should take full advantage of this information and be optimised to generate as much traffic as possible during the busy times. This can be achieved by setting up separate campaigns with different budgets that have timing rules to only set them running on certain days of the week. With this setup it’s possible to maximise the budget and therefore the exposure on your busy traffic days whilst pegging back the budget on the quiet days. This should increase the traffic for a PPC campaign without having to outlay extra money. To put this into perspective, this plan was implemented for one of our clients recently to increase budgets for the start of the week and lower it for weekends when there was little traffic. Just by implementing this plan we have increased the number of clicks by 10% and the conversion rate has also increased by 10% and these improvements required no extra budget.
Planning ahead for trends doesn’t have to stop at the short term view of days and weeks. Seasonal changes also need to be planned for in advance and with there being just over 2 months before what Google registered as the busiest day for e-commerce this time last year for Christmas then we all know that comes around sooner than you think. Online retail sales in Q4 were at £9.6bn in 2006 and increased by 82% to £17.6bn in 2007. This trend is looking set to continue based on a 38% increase in sales for the first half of 2008 against last year.
All of these figures show the obvious potential impact this will have on a PPC campaign and drives home how important it is to plan ahead. Cost per click rates will increase in the run up to Christmas and if not planned for will result in your PPC budget being spent up quicker than normal and leave your ads suspended at the most critical time. This could result is a loss of thousands of pounds of profit if your pay per click campaign is not managed correctly.
Here at Click Consult we have over 25 online marketing experts dedicated to managing and planning your campaigns efficiently leaving you to spend your time increasing your profits elsewhere. Call us today on 0845 205 0292 to see what we can do to increase your profits.
