Easter is an ever-growing popular holiday in Australia, presenting huge opportunities for advertisers to produce some really effective and compelling campaigns, to reach a vast and varied market.
Like with all activity we plan for our clients, when planning our Easter campaigns, our display team set out our main tactics and creative execution and ensure we plan importance on our set up and the data we want to capture to help our client’s campaigns evolve.
Here are our tips for getting your Display campaigns in order.
Programmatic Tactics
Programmatic campaigns produce huge volumes of data but it’s what you do with this data that will differentiate you from your competitors and help you to cut through the noise.
There are many opportunities to plug in data from various sources to help personalise an ad that will resonate with the user.
Increasing the granularity of your targeting will drive higher efficiencies in your programmatic activity, and in the case of planning activity during times when you need to support specific campaign bursts around holidays such as Easter, you should be looking to employ these tactics by building out custom audiences and contextual audience solutions. Messages received by specific audiences adjacent to contextually relevant content delivers significantly better results.
Simply put, custom audience solutions are about creating an audience of buyers to meet your exact targeting needs. These will vary from advertiser to advertiser but the construction of a campaign remains constant. Building out custom audiences, understanding who they are and how they behave online will help you to target them.
Below are some examples of custom audience segments that could be built to reach the Easter market:
- Easter > People with purchase behaviours and interests toward Easter
- Chocolate Lovers > People interested in or likely buyers of chocolate
- Parents of young children > People interested in going to the cinema, theatre, restaurants etc.
- Days Out > People interested in days out and Family things to do over the Easter Break.
- Easter Travel > People interested in or likely buyers of romantic getaways (city breaks, spa weekends, luxury hotels etc.).
When we discuss contextual audience solutions, we are discussing a solution whereby web crawlers will crawl content and not the consumer. Searching content for relevant keywords that dictate the ‘topic’ will then lead to audience segments, as audiences are driven by relevant content (Easter Baking page > Trending content focused on Easter baking recipes and ideas.)
If you know the content, you can extrapolate not only the audiences but deliver the right messaging at that moment where it is relevant.
1. Refresh creative to support your Easter campaign
We have discussed how programmatic media and tactics can help drive efficiency, however, this can only go so far. You can’t let the creative let you down! Creative has the potential to either bring your brand to life or bring life into the media placement or audience segment even more.
Every advertiser must decide on an array of variables when planning campaigns, how much to spend on creative, whether to seek high reach or precise targets, the context of the message, or how to add an element of recency.
Your creative must play an important role in this mix. In this world where all things are digital, and people’s time is precious, you need to be compelling enough to capture attention through truly creative work, to drive engagement and evoke emotion. Whilst all variables are important and have seen rises over the last few years, creative is cited as almost 50% of overall performance (Nielsen), showing how crucial it is to get this right.
A huge part of your success will be the content that you put in front of a user, to influence them to take an action. In essence, the creative is the shop window for your brand and gives you a chance to inform the user on what to do next.
Even a simple revision and refresh of your creative by implementing Easter-related imagery, colours and copy to support your campaign will ensure that your ads stand out, are more relevant and compelling and will help you to see higher CTR and decrease in CPA’s for your activity.
2. Take a test and learn approach
A test and learn approach is key. Having transparency on your display campaign is more than just the clarity of your fees and how the budget is being spend. It relates to your data and how it is used.
The data is there, you just need to make sure you have visibility on all elements of your campaign, allow you to feed the data back into the rest of your marketing activity. Don’t just run the campaign, make sure you take something from it too.
Make sure your tracking set up is spot on, think about what information you would like to collect and then collect it. You will be able to gather learnings to feed them back in for continual optimisation of performance and it will also give you a great foundation and head start on the activity you run next Easter!
Ramp up PPC activity and budget
Whilst other elements of your digital marketing strategy such as SEO are not quick fixes and something you need to think about in advance, PPC campaigns can be set-up and changed much more quickly. These tips will help you to ensure you get as much as possible from your Easter PPC campaigns.
1. Review last year’s performance
Before spending huge amounts of time and effort optimising your PPC campaigns for Easter, take a look back at last year’s performance. Look at how last year’s campaigns performed. What went well and what didn’t?
What can you improve on this year to make sure your Easter campaign is successful and delivers the conversions you’re looking for?
Take a look at last year’s best selling products or days with the most traffic so that you can make educated decisions about where spend should be focused this year.
2. Ensure budget sign off
One of the most effective ways to take advantage of seasonal peaks is to increase your PPC budget. During seasons such as Easter and Christmas, conversions tend to be higher so spending the extra budget will be worth it.
After looking back at last year, you will already know what type of budget increases you will need so it’s essential to ensure sign off on budget well ahead of the campaign starting so that you can really get the most from it.
3. Update ad copy & use countdown ads
If you want to capitalise on Easter traffic, you should update your ad copy to include seasonal keywords and to promote your Easter offers. Not only will this help to increase the relevance of your ads, it will also help customers to find what they’re looking for.
In addition, the countdown feature on PPC ads is extremely effective during seasonal spikes. Countdowns attract customers and lead to conversions once they land on your site by creating urgency and letting customers know that they only have a limited period of time to take you up on your offers or promotions.
4. Update seasonal landing pages
If you are driving traffic to specific seasonal landing pages (which you should be!) make sure you update them with this year’s Easter keywords and keep them updated with the right products. Driving extra traffic to your website and landing pages is great but you need to make sure the traffic is converting.
Optimising your landing pages to reflect seasonal changes will improve the overall user experience and generate more conversions.
With changes made to your ad copy to reflect Easter messaging, tweaking your landing page copy will ensure the messaging is consistent which will not only improve user experience, it will also improve your quality score, improving your ad position and leading to a lower CPC.
Other ways to optimise your PPC campaigns for Easter include:
- Review Google shopping feed to current Google specs, fixing any errors in merchant centre
- Add in merchant promotion on relevant products in merchant centre
- Mirror promotions on Bing’s search engine
- Include any seasonal terms in the account in specific campaigns
These tips will help you to increase your visibility over the Easter weekend to make sure you’re seen by the people who are spending time at home and searching online. For more tips, why not take a look at part one of our blog?