There will be times when your business or clients will be affected by seasonality or current events. When these situations happen it’s important to take immediate action to limit any negative impact. Below are three quick actions I take whenever large events occur that affect account performance.
1. Reassess your budgets and creative
Typically, when current events or seasonality impact my accounts, budgets are lowered anywhere from 20-60% to curb loss in performance and prevent ads from showing in less than favorable searches or content. This also allows you time to think up a game plan on how you want to approach the current situation. Be sure to discuss any budget decreases with your clients ahead of time in case there’s a piece of data you might be missing. For example, with current events we’ve seen many businesses start to lose revenue, however, if you’re in Finance you might have seen an uptick of people who need advice on what to do with their money.
Now is the time to audit your creative to ensure it’s sensitive to current events and to increase visibility to your services to acclimate to current circumstances. Do you have drive-up pick up, free delivery, virtual tours or Facetime consultations? Add these offers in your copy and ad extensions to keep users interested.
2. Use Google Trends
Google Trends is an excellent tool to gain an understanding of the popularity of your keywords or topics. Here’s a link to get a further understanding of how this tool works. What’s cool about this tool is it can be used if search trends outside of the US and for different languages. I usually look at the last 7 days to get the most recent data and type in my high performing keywords. In this example, I’ll use an open-ended keyword like “flights to”.
If you scroll down, the feature that I use most often is the “Top” and “Rising” related queries. Continuing with my example, by using this feature I can get a sense for which destinations are seeing an increase in demand so I can take the following actions: add them as new keywords, increase my bids and add new negative keywords.
3. Think ahead
During these times, it’s likely you’ll have some downtime. Use it to finally get to that campaign re-structure, evaluate creative performance and most importantly start planning for your comeback. It’s very likely you’ll face higher than usual competition so start planning how you’ll get ahead of them. Start building those audiences, it’s likely you’ll see a dip in traffic to your site, however, you’re still getting visitors who are interested in your services or products but don’t feel comfortable committing until circumstances change.
