Feature Spotlight: Facebook Campaign Wizard

By Simon Whittick May 14th, 2013

The Feature Spotlight blog series highlights and discusses the use cases for new and popular features within the Marin platform. Today we’ll be taking a look at the recently released Facebook Campaign Wizard, a time-saving feature for social advertisers.

One Year after the Facebook IPO

It’s been a busy year for Facebook since their IPO last year, as highlighted in our recent infographic. There have been many innovations, with a strong shift towards more socially relevant and mobile-centric ad technology. As Facebook advertisers have become more sophisticated, their best practices have also matured. Marin has captured and presented these best practices in our new report, The Marketer’s Guide to Driving ROI from Facebook Advertising: Top Tips for Building Awareness & Generating Financial Returns. This paper reviews the top tips gathered from global advertisers and agencies using Marin Software to manage their Facebook advertising.

The Facebook Challenge

While Facebook’s ad innovations have grown at a rapid pace since the IPO, social marketers continue to face scaling challenges when creating new Facebook campaigns—building out effective audience targets and generating engaging creative at scale is still very resource intensive. Large advertisers leveraging hundreds of images, ad creative, target audiences, and campaign combinations struggle to build high quality Facebook campaigns that drive successful ROI.

Marin’s Solution

The Facebook Campaign Wizard makes it easy for Facebook marketers to create new campaigns and ad creative. The step-by-step interface provides a quick and easy, streamlined workflow for creating successful Facebook campaigns. Four simple campaign creation screens guide users through building a new campaign, setting audience targeting, generating creative, and deploying automated bidding. With Facebook’s ever-changing environment of new ad types, formats, and placements, Marin’s Facebook Campaign Wizard makes it easy for Facebook marketers to stay ahead of the curve and get the most out of their social advertising initiatives.

For more information on Marin’s Facebook Campaign Wizard, please contact info@marinsoftware.com

Google Is Listening: Enhancing the Enhanced Campaign

By Kye Mou April 11th, 2013

On Tuesday Google announced that advertisers will soon be able to set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level, in addition to the campaign level, for enhanced campaigns. This comes on the heels of Google’s release of two new ValueTrack parameters: {ifmobile:[value]} and {ifnotmobile:[value]}. Google also indicated July 22, 2013 as the start of the migration deadline, when AdWords will begin automatically upgrading legacy campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

These recent announcements shouldn’t come as a surprise to search marketers. Google has historically made adjustments to new AdWords features as market demands became more evident. (A recent example is last year’s update to the campaign ad rotation settings.) Sophisticated search marketers have been asking for additional enhanced campaign features to provide additional control and transparency for optimizing their paid search programs. Today, we’ll review the two recently announced enhancements to enhanced campaigns and discuss their importance to search marketers who operate in a multi-device world.

Ad Group Mobile Bid Adjustment

Before this Announcement: A mobile bid adjustment could only be set at the campaign level, which allows advertisers to boost desktop keyword bids for searches on mobile devices by -100% to 300% across the entire campaign.

The Ask from Marketers: Search marketers are used to granularity. From management to reporting to optimization, sophisticated marketers often desire to operate at the most granular levels possible, which often means making decisions down at the keyword level. The reason is that clicks, cost, conversions, and revenue data are all attributed at the keyword level; and in order to optimize bids and maximize performance, keyword-level bids needed to be calculated and applied individually.

The Updated Approach: Google will now allow advertisers to set a mobile bid adjustment at the ad group level. Once implemented, the same boost range, from -100% to 300%, can be applied to all desktop keyword bids within a given ad group for searches made on mobile devices. The campaign level mobile bid adjustment will be ignored if an ad group level bid adjustment has been set.

What It Means: The enhancement to allow group-level mobile bid adjustments provides search marketers with additional control over their enhanced campaigns and mobile performance. For advertisers that follow account best practices, where ad groups contain a small set of like or similar performing keywords, this enhancement should meet the requirements for most paid search programs. Although some search marketers may long for keyword-level mobile bid adjustments, keep in mind that the goal of enhanced campaigns is to simplify the way advertisers manage their paid search campaigns across device, location, and time of day. Group-level adjustments appear to be a reasonable and effective compromise.

{ifmobile} and {ifnotmobile} ValueTrack Parameter

Before this Announcement: Search marketers could only leverage one landing page across all devices rather than have the ability to direct users to optimized landing pages based on device. The other option was to remove keyword level destination URLs in favor of creative level URLs.

The Ask from Marketers: Screen sizes and user behavior varies significantly between desktop and mobile devices. Presenting users with a device-specific landing page is critical to improving the user experience and maximizing paid search performance. Consequently, advertisers wanted the ability to define two destination URLs at the keyword level in order to present the most relevant content and optimal experience based on the device the user is searching on.

The Updated Approach: The {ifmobile} and {ifnotmobile} ValueTrack parameters will enable search marketers to direct users to device-specific landing pages at the keyword level. Additionally, these new parameters enable the measurement of the effectiveness of campaigns by device for advertisers who are unable to leverage the {device} ValueTrack parameter.

What It Means: The ability to assign a device-specific landing page falls directly in line with Google’s approach to a multi-device world—helping advertisers reach consumers with the right ad experience based on device, location, and time of day. As users move across device, this enhancement will enable search marketers to remain relevant and engaging.

Google Is Listening

Clearly, Google is open to enhancing enhanced campaigns based on industry feedback. However, I wouldn’t expect any further changes to be announced ahead of the migration deadline as advertisers nail down their migration plans and establish revised best practices before heading into the holiday season. In order for enhanced campaigns to be a win-win-win solution (for Google, the consumer, and the advertiser), Google will need to continue collecting and applying market feedback, especially once all advertisers have migrated over to enhanced campaigns.

Refresh, Relocate & Remove – Three Strategies for Retargeting Success, Part 2

By Kamal Thakarsey March 5th, 2013

Innovation in retargeting technology has increased over the last few years. With new players, the simplification of tools, and an increase in platform integrations, retargeting has become a valuable channel for reacquiring leads and filling in the middle of the marketing funnel. Last week in part one of our two part series, we discussed why testing platforms, setting realistic call-to-actions (CTA), and segmenting visitors are all critical to a successful retargeting program. Today, we’ll conclude our discussion by reviewing the importance of refreshing ad creative, integrating geo-targeting strategies, and opting out employees from retargeting campaigns.

Refresh: Update Ad Creative Often

Ads that are used to retarget your visitors tend to follow them around as they surf the web. The constant bombardment of the same or similar ads can not only lead to ad blindness, but can also frustrate your audience. To increase the likelihood that your visitor pool will notice and engage with your retargeting campaign, consider refreshing your ad creative frequently—every week or month depending on your business needs. Consider testing new CTAs, promoting a different piece of collateral, or simply changing the look and feel of your ad creative. The more often you refresh your ads, the more opportunities there are to re-engage your audience.

Relocate: Integrate a Geo-Targeting Strategy

The scope of your business or the engagement of your audience might be isolated to a specific geography—shipping only within the United Kingdom or a contest that only includes Australian residents.  If geography is a limitation or plays a significant factor for your business, it’s important to understand which retargeting vendors support geo-targeting functionality. Even if your campaigns are performing well, there are still opportunities to remove specific geographies and eliminate unwanted impression and clicks that result in wasted spend and unqualified leads. On the other hand, geo-targeting an emerging market and retargeting visitors to promote additional discover can help grow brand and lead generation efforts in strategic geographies.

Remove: Opt Out Employees

Employees who visit your company’s website often times become a bullseye for your retargeting campaigns. While the number of impressions may not make a huge impact on overall campaign performance, they still represent valuable impressions and spend that could’ve been directed towards a more qualified audience. Most platforms don’t really offer a simple solution for addressing this challenge (i.e. IP exclusion).  However, you can build a segment, for example visitors to your website’s Careers page, and exclude it from your retargeting campaigns.  Ask your colleagues to visit the Careers page once and they should be “opted out” of retargeting (depending on cookie settings).  This is by far the most efficient and effective solution I’ve found to date (let me know if you leverage a different strategy).

Retargeting remains a critical marketing channel for reaching and re-engaging your potential customers. As you manage and optimize your retargeting program, keep the six strategies and best practices in mind. They’ll help you kick-start your program and optimize campaign performance for long-term success.

“Let’s Try This Again…” – Three Strategies for Retargeting Success, Part 1

“Let’s Try This Again…” – Three Strategies for Retargeting Success, Part 1

By Kamal Thakarsey February 27th, 2013

Retargeting has been a commonplace strategy for online marketers for quite some time. However, many companies, specifically non-retailers, overlook the value of this channel for reacquiring leads and filling in the middle of the marketing funnel. Over the last few years, the landscape for display retargeting has seen a sharp rise in innovation; new players, the simplification of tools, and an increase in platform integrations have made it easier for online marketers to kick-start and expand their retargeting strategies. In part one of this two part series, we’ll discuss why testing platforms, setting realistic call-to-actions (CTA), and segmenting visitors are all critical to a successful retargeting program.

Test Multiple Platforms

Don’t get complacent. Just because one retargeting campaign is performing well, doesn’t mean you should stop exploring other platforms. Many vendors offer very similar tools, however you may be able to amplify your message by reaching a broader audience on placements that your original platform may not have been working with. Due to the relatively low risk and ease of implementation, it doesn’t hurt to test additional platforms.

Set Realistic CTAs

With retargeting, especially in the B2B world, you often have one shot to drive a visitor back onto your website. In most cases, assume that you failed the first time in converting a visitor because they weren’t interested in what you were trying to sell. For example, I often leverage a demo or trial signup as a CTA in order to gauge if visitors are interested in learning more or trying out our software. If these visitors enter my retargeting pool, I have to assume that the original CTA was too direct the first time and that I didn’t provide them with the information needed to continue driving them down the conversion funnel. If it didn’t work the first time, it’s highly unlikely it’ll work now. In these scenarios, I try to push a more top of the funnel CTA like downloading one of our industry thought leadership whitepapers. Visitors get to learn more about Marin Software and our platform, and we get an introduction and second chance to show them our value proposition. It’s a win-win.

Segment Visitors

Segment your visitor pool into as many buckets that make sense for your business. The more buckets you create, the more targeted you can be with your remarketing efforts. If you lumped all your visitors into one bucket, you‘d miss out on opportunities to pitch different content or products based on what these visitors have indicated they’re interested in. Why promote socks when they’re looking for shoes? Why pitch a paid search white paper when they’re interested in retargeting? Many online retailers do a great job executing this strategy, and B2B companies are tuning in and following suit. By segmenting visitors, you’ll also be able to remove certain visitors from your retargeting pool. For example, if someone visited your site looking for a job, remove them from your retargeting list. Over the long run, strategies like this one will help increase cost efficiency and lead to higher click-through rates (CTR).

As you manage and optimize your retargeting program, keep these three strategies and their best practices in mind. Next week, we’ll continue our discussion and walk through the best practices for keeping ad creative fresh, leveraging geo-targeting, and opting out employees from retargeting.

Google’s New “Enhanced Campaigns”: What It Means for Search Marketers

By Kye Mou February 7th, 2013

Yesterday Google announced the rollout of enhanced campaigns, a major AdWords product release that attempts to simplify the management of campaigns across devices. With enhanced campaigns, search marketers will be able to target consumers based on device, location, and time of day through a single campaign. However, for search marketers that currently leverage separate desktop, tablet, and mobile campaigns, Google’s enhanced campaigns will remove some of the control and transparency we’re used to having. Additional details on enhanced campaigns can be found here.

What Does This Mean? To understand the implications of Google’s enhanced campaigns, let’s review the benefits and concerns.

Benefits

• Mobile preferred creative: Search marketers will now be able to create mobile preferred ad creative that are delivered to users based on their device or when they’re searching.
• Consolidated and simplified bid management: Search marketers can now leverage bid adjustments to manage bids across devices, locations, time of day, and more from within a single campaign.

• Enhanced ad extensions management: Search marketers can now assign ad extensions at the ad group level and display ads across devices with the appropriate ad creative, sitelink, app, or extension, without having to manage multiple campaigns for every combination of device, location, and time of day. Furthermore, ad extensions can now be scheduled to turn on and off, such as during times when phone operators are unavailable.
• Advanced sitelinks management: Search marketers can now report on the performance metrics for individual ad sitelinks and monitor their approval status.
• New conversion types: Search marketers will now have the ability to track and report on calls and app downloads, enabling the optimization of campaigns based on these conversion types.

Concerns

• Device specific budgets: In combing all devices into a single campaign, budgets will also be combined, eliminating the ability for search marketers to set separate, device-optimized budgets across desktop-, tablet-, and mobile-only campaigns.
• Mobile-only campaigns: Without the ability to opt out of desktop/tablet device targeting, search marketers will no longer be able to leverage mobile-only campaigns. This may significantly impact advertisers, like mobile app and gaming companies, who only wish to advertise on mobile devices.
• Tablet specific optimization strategies: With tablet device targeting now combined with desktop, search marketers who have specific tablet strategies in place will lose that functionality.
• Bidding on mobile keywords: Since mobile bids are boosted by a percentage of desktop/tablet bids at the campaign level, search marketers can no longer calculate individual mobile keyword bids based on performance. Furthermore, bidding to a preferred position for specific mobile keywords to combat the limited SERP real estate on mobile devices is no longer possible.
• Bid multipliers: The requirement to layer bid multipliers based on device, location, and time of day introduces significant complexities for calculating optimal keyword bids. Furthermore, since bid adjustments are applied at the campaign level, separate time of day multipliers can’t be set for separate locations. For example: +20% for New York and +50% on Saturdays, and -20% for Chicago and -50% on Saturdays.
• Targeting mobile operating systems: Search marketers can no longer target campaigns to a specific mobile device or device operating system (i.e. iPhone, HTC, iOS, Android).

Google plans to roll out enhanced campaigns across advertisers over the next few weeks. As a result, advertisers may not have immediate access to this feature within their accounts. By mid-2013, all campaigns are expected to have been transitioned to enhanced campaigns.

Historical Quality Score and Why It Matters To Search Marketers

By Kye Mou February 5th, 2013

Of all the search publisher metrics available, Quality Score seems to always receive the most attention; yet search marketers have the least amount of visibility into how to effectively improve it and its impact on performance. What we do know is that every time a user conducts a search that triggers ads, a Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including:

• The keyword’s past click-through rate (CTR)
• The display URL’s past CTR
• The account history
• The quality of the landing page
• The keyword/ad relevance
• The keyword/search relevance

Notice that the first three factors on Google’s list reference performance history, even though the history of a keyword’s Quality Score is unavailable within the AdWords interface. Instead, rather than showing different Quality Scores across time, Google displays a single Quality Score that provides an estimate of that keyword’s overall quality.

For the most part this is adequate—search marketers analyze Quality Score at individual moments in time to understand keyword relevance and performance issues. However, this one-off-style approach to analyzing Quality Score fails to provide insight into how search marketers’ continuous efforts to optimize campaigns impact Quality Score, either positively or negatively.

Whether it’s testing brand new creative or introducing additional negative keywords, improving a keyword’s Quality Score can lead to a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher ad position. Changes in these two metrics can subsequently impact, among other things: CTR, costs, and return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, the influence each of those best practices has on keyword Quality Score is frequently lost with time, especially within larger accounts. Imagine having to record the daily Quality Score for two million keywords affected by new creative messaging.

To understand the impact of optimization efforts on Quality Score, search marketers need the ability to trend historical Quality Score, against other performance metrics, over time.

For example, by trending Quality Score and average CPC over a 3 month period, search marketers can understand the exact impact on cost that comes from an increase in Quality Score from 6 to 8. Trends that include other metrics like ROI and conversion rate highlight the indirect impact that Quality Score has on conversion and revenue goals. Though the concept of trending Quality Score over time appears basic, many search marketers are unable to do so.

To see a demo of historical Quality Score and other advance metrics in action, please contact Marin.

5 Quick Ways to Increase Paid Search CTR without Breaking a Sweat

By Kye Mou January 28th, 2013

Before writing this post, I performed a few web searches to scout out my competition. Based on that research, there appears to be one thing that everyone agrees upon about increasing paid search click-through-rate (CTR), the benefits:

• Increased Quality Score
• Increased ad position
• Lower cost-per-click

However, given the title of this post, I figured just about everyone has their quick ways for increasing CTR—and I was right. There’s about 20 “quick” ways to increase your CTR, but not all of them are quick. Create granular keyword groupings? Restructuring campaigns and resetting Quality Score is a long term strategy. Give something away for free? Let’s choose to ignore that one. Look for assisted conversions? I personally don’t enjoy swimming in an ocean of data. Include pricing? And if prices change, it’ll be a fun week. Though all of these tactics and more do plenty to increase CTR, my goal today is to present five ways search marketers can increase CTR without breaking a sweat.

1. Implement Ad Sitelinks

This is unanimously the number one way to quickly increase CTR. Sitelinks provides up to six additional deep links to specific and highly relevant content on your site. These links not only expand your search engine results page (SERP) real estate, but they also enable search marketers to point users towards high-value landing pages, such as form fills and store locators. Keep in mind that up to six links can be added per campaign, which was increased from four in 2011. So if you haven’t touched your sitelinks in a while, it’s time to go back and ensure you have six updated links available.

For more information on sitelinks and how to enable them, click here.

2. Pause Poor Performing Creative

Remember that creative test you were running way back when? Well it’s still running, and one or more of those creative is hurting the entire ad group. As you prioritize ad groups for CTR optimization, be sure to evaluate the performance of existing creative. Though some poor performing creative will be easier to spot than others, be sure to reach some level of statistical significance before cutting ties and pausing those creative. It’s important to remember that poor performing creative represent an opportunity cost. By weeding them out of your account, you can drive more traffic through more relevant and engaging creative.

For additional best practices on creative testing and optimization, click here.

3. Leverage Differentiating Text

There are so many elements search marketers can test when it comes to differentiating their creative from their competitors. Let’s use a short list with simple explanations:

• Call-to-Action: a staple for all advertisers, a simple, yet strong call-to-action encourages users to engage with a purpose. For example, “Register for free today!” or “Shop early and save”.
• Unique Selling Point: incorporating free shipping, price match guarantees, promotions, and other unique selling points into creative not only sets you apart from competitors, but makes your creative that much more compelling.
• Numbers and Figures: to break the repetitiveness of words and sentences, use numbers and figures (i.e. &, ®, ™) as an effective way to bring attention to creative.
• Display URLs: there are a number of ways to arrange your display URL and incorporate keywords into them to increase relevance. For example, “keyword.example.com” or “example.com/category/keyword”. However, keep in mind that some users copy and paste display URLs into the navigation bar, so be prepared with a redirect or an effective 404 page.

4. Mine for Negative Keywords

Most search marketers know how to mine for negative keywords, but the tune changes when discussing how often. Generating a search query report is simple; with some enterprise class solutions generating them automatically. Identify keywords that have received impressions, but very few clicks. But also take note of irrelevant tokens that appear often in queries. For example, tokens like “free”, “reviews”, and “used” often appear alongside relevant keywords. Add these and those irrelevant keywords to eliminate unwanted impressions and clicks.

For more information on developing an effective negative keyword strategy, click here.

5. Use High Volume Tokens

Keyword tokens within creative will appear in bold whenever they match or closely match a user’s search query. To improve the relevancy of your creative to the keywords within an ad group, include tokens with high impression share within creative text. For example, if users are more likely to include “clothing” in their query, rather than “apparel”, generate creative that includes the token “clothing”, even if both tokens appear in multiple keywords within the same ad group. Using the most relevant tokens within your creative will increase the relevance for a larger share of impressions and help increase CTR.
Incrementally increasing CTR takes testing and continuous optimization of keywords and creative. This involves using both short term and long term strategies. Hopefully, with the tactics I’ve imparted, you can begin increasing your CTR today…quickly and sweatband-free.

Three Search Marketing Resolutions for the New Year

By Kamal Thakarsey January 9th, 2013

With January underway, most search marketers have already made their personal New Year resolutions. Whether it’s better health, spending more time with friends and family, or helping out in the community, we all have high hopes for 2013. For me, and many other search marketers, the motivation to do better each year defines the strategies I hope to execute on in 2013. It all starts with planning and creativity. After analyzing this past year’s performance and factoring in the objectives that have been set, three additional New Year resolutions made it on my list. The following are what I hope to do more of for my paid search program in 2013 and how I plan to get there.

1. Test More of Everything

My testing plans tend to go through cycles of high activity and mild dormancy. Building a test, analyzing results, implement the findings, and building the next test takes time and often loses steam when coupled with a busy schedule. This year, I’m going to test more and test often. This will include not just search landing pages, but also ad creative, conversion pages, and display banners. I’m working with my design team to create an optimization calendar that fits their bandwidth and allows me to prioritize tests across our multiple marketing channels. Testing more will be especially be critical this year as I look to grow leads incrementally without expanding budgets.

2. Re-Organize Messy Campaigns

Though this resolution is much more time consuming and has more long term than short term implications, I believe that it will pay big dividends during critical seasonal periods of 2013. Many times search campaigns are built out with a structure that makes sense at that time. However, as campaigns mature and outgrow that structure, they no longer perform at optimal levels. Aggressive keyword expansion can lead to less relevant creative; and less aggressive negative keyword expansion can result in unwanted clicks. On top of that, as Google and Bing come out with new features and functionality, the account structure may become dated and less productive.

This year, I’m reviewing the structure of my campaigns and groups. Groups that achieved lower than average click-through rates (CTR) in 2012 will be split out into more granular ones. Since keywords under this new structure will vary less within any one group, I can then generate highly relevant creative and leverage more specific landing pages in hopes of increasing Quality Score, CTR, and conversion rate.

3. Prioritize Creative Optimization

I’ve talked about this particular resolution in my previous articles, yet it always seems to fall lower in the pecking order of my daily optimization efforts. Especially among small to medium sized businesses where budgets are tight, creative testing and optimization is critical to incremental growth and improvements in overall paid search performance. In fact, all three of my resolutions for 2013 fall into the category of maximizing performance without increasing budgets. Splitting keywords out into more granular groups will require continuous testing to increase relevance and improve creative performance. To capitalize on the largest revenue opportunities, I’ll prioritize my optimization efforts to groups with high traffic volume, but poor performance. This is likely where I’ll get the most return on my time spent optimizing creative.

The key this New Year is building on the momentum from 2012. There are plenty of new publisher features and tools like remarketing and Product Listing Ads out there to try. Regardless, I’ve decided to rely on these three basic optimization strategies—aligning them with my marketing objectives—to improve my paid search program and increase conversions in 2013.

Google Embraces the Marin “Cloner”

By Matt Lawson January 3rd, 2013

In 2008, Marin unveiled the industry’s first “Cloner.” Eliminating tedious manual efforts in spreadsheets, the Cloner allows advertisers to quickly copy campaigns in order to replicate campaign settings and keyword targeting across geographies and devices. With the touch of a button, campaigns, budgets, ad groups, keywords, and creative are instantly duplicated, saving search marketers countless hours each week.

Today, Google took a giant leap forward embracing tools vendors and the innovative idea behind the Marin Cloner. Until now, the AdWords API Terms and Conditions have restricted vendors from cloning campaigns from Google to competing engines such as Yahoo! or Bing. This morning, Google announced a change to their terms and conditions which allows for cloning across engines, providing advertisers with true portability for their campaign data and the ability to more easily manage ad campaigns across search engines.

Search marketers will no doubt be excited by this move, as they can now avoid the duplicate efforts required to manage identical campaigns across Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. But this change is good for more than marketers mental health! Ensuring data portability is good for the industry, because it puts marketers in control. Using tools like Marin, marketers can now more easily measure, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across channels, publishers and devices from a single platform.

Look for this change to unlock a sea of innovative features which are yet to come, benefiting advertisers, publishers, tools providers, and yes, even Google as marketers see higher returns on their integrated marketing campaigns.

The Search Marketer’s Post-Holiday Checklist

By Kamal Thakarsey December 26th, 2012

The holiday season is approaching the finish line and 2012 is almost officially in the books. With Product Listing Ads seeing increased adoption and mobile devices continuing to garner the attention of consumers and advertisers, 2013 should prove to be yet another challenging, but rewarding year for search marketers. But before we usher in the New Year, we need to remember that our work in 2012 is not yet over. With the busiest part of the holiday shopping season behind us, it’s time to take a step back and prepare our paid search programs for success in 2013. This four item checklist will help search marketers review and prioritize our post-holiday campaign management and optimization efforts.

1. Review Keyword Bids

To acquire more revenue and in anticipation of increased competition, many retailers boosted their bids during the holiday shopping season. These boosts are typically implemented when there are seasonal increases in revenue-per-click (RPC) or conversion rate. As the peak of the shopping season ends, RPC and conversion rate are likely to drop.

With visitors spending less, or less likely to convert during this time of the year, search marketers should adjust keyword bids to align with current seasonal RPC or conversion rate. Waiting too long to dampen these bids can lead to wasted ad spend and poor campaign performance. This strategy also applies to B2B and lead gen companies. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be spending more per click for less relevant or unqualified traffic.

2. Pause Holiday-Specific Promotions

Did you promote any discounts or free shipping offers? Is there any holiday themed content for your ad creative or landing pages? As holiday promotions end and the season comes to a close, review your active ad creative and landing pages and ensure that they align with your promotional calendar. Nothing hurts the shopping experience more than an outdated content or expired promotional offers. Last year, I remember seeing post-holiday search ads with expired discounts. Don’t be that search marketer! Pause or schedule to pause any holiday ad creative and revert landing pages back to their standard theme. In fact, activating default creative can sometime improve overall performance depending on their historical quality scores.

3. Adjust Campaign Budgets

During the holiday season, most campaign budgets were expanded to support an increase in traffic volume. As December comes to an end, review your January campaign daily budgets from 2012 and ensure that appropriate budgets have been set heading into 2013. Be sure to factor in projected spend increases to your paid search program and allocate budgets across your campaigns accordingly. Forgetting to adjust daily budgets to align with seasonality could end up costing you a significant chunk of your monthly budget in the first week of January.

4. Generate Reports

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is a fantastic opportunity to look back at not only the holiday season, but the entire year in review. Being so tactical about new campaigns and launching new programs throughout the course of a year, makes it difficult to spend the necessary amount of time analyzing trends and reviewing granular levels of account performance. Part of closing out the 2012 holiday season is preparing for 2013, and more specifically, preparing for the 2013 holiday season.

Generate keyword level reports to understand how much RPC or conversion rate changed throughout the year. Compare campaign budgets with their actual spend levels to better allocate budgets in 2013. Generate raw search query reports to uncover additional negative keywords or new keyword opportunities. Being successful in 2013 means understanding what worked and what didn’t work in 2012. These reports will undoubtedly aid in doing exactly that.

I hope 2012 was a prosperous year for you and your paid search program. With this four-step checklist, you should be able to maintain that momentum heading into 2013. Stay tuned next week as I usher in the New Year with my search marketer’s New Year’s resolutions.