How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns During the COVID-19 Pandemic?
The hustle-bustle around us has come to a still these past few weeks. Travelling is on a halt, schools and colleges are closed; governments are busy devising strategies to cope up with COVID 19. We are suddenly holed up in our homes and there is no better options insight so far. The economy is nosediving and businesses are suffering worldwide. Many small businesses, unable to bear the brunt of these harsh times have either shutting down their operations or minimizing them.
COVID-19 changes what we search on Google these days
The advertising landscape is changing considerably as well. This pandemic is causing an overall shift in people’s behavior towards all sorts of advertising campaigns. The Google Ads results are a witness to these drastic changes. There has been increased traffic towards non-profits and charities. While there is a general decline in product-based searches.
According to Kent McGuire from McGuire Law Firm, more and more people are constantly browsing google for information related to COVID 19 and the precautions thereof. We have seen markets plummeting, CPC’s fall, but an increase in CTR as well as the CVR’s. Many industries are taking a hit while many are found their litany in the optimization of the PPC and are witnessing a surge in the business volume.
With search trends changes, advertisers must adapt!
One of the best strategies to keep your business going is to keep adapting. It becomes quintessential for advertisers and business managers to keep an eye out on what is trending and how. The situation is pretty much dependent on who is going to fight better by optimizing the PPC campaigns and garnering a better audience.
With the ‘this too shall pass’ optimism, it is time to roll up some sleeve and work on the paid search campaigns that will help you keep the business on a roll.
1. Review your search terms regularly
Use SE Ranking to constantly monitor your competitors. You can stay updated with what strategies are being used and you can follow-up with counterstrategies. With the SEO/PPC Competitor Research, you can discover what keywords are being used for efficient advertisement campaigns. This tool will monitor all the competitive URLs against the paid and organic traffic they are generating. The ranking data for these URLs can be made available for specific time segments. You can particularly monitor data since the Pandemic to see search queries are being made.
SE Ranking will not just stop here, you will be able to extract all the historical ads for a particular query, and you can compare that with campaigns running during this particular period. Monitor the changes that have been made and follow up. Now that searches have quickly exploded and are mostly related to COVID 19, it becomes more important to understand which ads are bringing in traffic.
You can create a surveillance record for all the major competing players and get started with a better and more fresh campaign. Type in your competitor’s URL, you will be able to get all the information about the organic and paid traffic, most popular keywords, paid keywords and the amount of traffic generated by each and so much more.
Monitoring the search trends, you will have a better understanding of how people are searching online. For example, for any keyword, you can choose a particular region (if your campaign is geotargeted) and you will be able to extract all the important information including search volume, click cost assessment, traffic cost assessment, google ads competition, and the organic search results as well. You can finally reassess the keyword that you are using for your paid searched based on the results you just gathered.
Also, online interaction can be of great help. Right now, when most of the people are in their homes, trying to stay safe, there is a good amount of time to check your website and interact a little if your product or services is generating clicks with the campaign. You can use chatbots and live chat to interact with your existing or potential customers. This will provide you with input on what your customers are searching for and what is the bracket for the queries if any.
2. Follow trending COVID-19 searches
Switch on to Google Trends for the keyword “Covid-19” and you will be amazed to see the spike in traffic. Google Trends has been one of the most effective tools to get an understanding of what people are searching out there.
Now that COVID-19 has taken the world by storm, it is a bit obvious that most of these searched rights now will be more or less about the coronavirus. Admitting to this sudden surge, Google Trends has recently launched the Google Trend Coronavirus Hub. This portal is specifically catering to the COVID-19 search trends. You can keep an eye on this hub to understand the changing interests and priorities.
For example, it’s a hard time for law firms but it’s not grief for them. Inversely, some of them like Attorney Brian White & Associates attempt to follow Google Trends and promote their blog posts using Covid-19 keyword trends that help them increase more traffic and conversions.
3. Find negative keywords
Every time you introduce a new keyword for any of your campaigns you are taking a chance with the campaign budget. It is either a win or loss kind of situation. Every new keyword can attract irrelevant and unsavory searches and this is what makes it utterly important to know all the new negative keywords before they start trending. Keywords that are not optimized can eat through your budget and before you know it, there will be a flock of irrelevant traffic on your ads.
Negative keywords can vary depending on the type of industry you belong to. Right now, as everything is getting a major shift, every major and minor change reflects on your ad campaign. You need to be proactive, which means start reviewing display campaign placements and search terms in real-time for COVID-19 keywords and related content. Create negative keyword lists that get a regular update for a better PPC campaign and also for a negative match.
4. Choose a smart bidding strategy
Considering how COVID-19 changed the landscape for almost everything, you have some bid adjustments in order. The search behavior is up in shambles as compared to what it was, there is a new paradigm shift. Take help from the smart bidding season ability adjustments from Google. This will optimize your search and display campaigns about the COVID-19 period. This will make sure that the conversion rates will increase and the automatic adjustment of smart bidding algorithms can help you make the most out of this situation.
Adjust the existing smart bidding strategy to understand the changing data in a better way and this will, in turn, help you adjust the CPC bids in real-time, to match the campaign goals. Just to choose a better smart bidding strategy, always keep your budget and goal into consideration.
5. Reach more people through paid social ads
Right now is the time, when it is more than crucial to stay relevant as the consumer behavior is up for an extreme shift. According to Koenig & Owen LLC, you need to stay in contact with your existing and potential customers via other mediums as the google search is currently on a fall. Diversify your advertisement networks to mitigate the volatility that arises out of complete dependence on one network. Also, it will be a plus as you might be able to find new target customers.
Some of the most popular social media advertising platforms you can leverage now are:
· TikTok
Now that more and more people are sitting inside their homes, with the internet being the only rescuer, you might be able to deliver some additional footfall with increased online communication via social media mostly. Facebook, for example, reported a fifty percent surge in the messaging quantity so far.
This after many people switched back to Facebook who had earlier jettisoned it over privacy concerns. More and more people are investing time in live streams, groups, messaging apps. You can monetize this opportunity without making a considerable change in your existing ad budget. Try paid social ads and PPC to explore more of this opportunity. You can explore these
· In video ad placements on all major media platforms
· YouTube ad placements
· Display ad-expansion on Microsoft audience network and Google Display Network.
· Twitter and Facebook with strong consideration for the brand reputation issues that might result due to negative behavior on these two major platforms.
· Try Pinterest for consumers who are discovering products to make a purchase.
Understandably, tomorrow or someday shortly we might be able to go back to whatever is left of the normal life after this pandemic. The lockdown will go and so will the social distancing. People will start picking up where they left and there might be a new order in creation.
Stay safe, advertise smart
Whatever it is that is going to fuel our tomorrow, you can make sure that your business stays alert and remains ready for whatever comes next. The markets are unpredictable today, you can seek help from SEO tools to make them a bit predictable. Keep your PPC and other social media ad campaigns on toes and get ready to face another day. This is how we have survived so far, and this is how we will do it again. This might just be the beauty of the human spirit to keep going.
