Annually, Valentine’s Day spending averages $13.19 billion, and 2013 will likely be no exception. 61.8% of consumers celebrate this special day of love and romance, for which 196 million of roses are grown on average each year and 180 million of Valentine’s Day’s card are exchanged. Consumers spend about $116 on Valentine’s Day. Ignoring Valentine’s Day is not a good idea, especially for men, as 53% of women say they would end their relationship if they didn’t get something for Valentine’s Day. (1)
Search marketers across various industries also shouldn’t ignore the day. Last year, one out of five consumers shopped online for gifts. (2) Cards and candy traditionally top the list of gifts given, followed by flowers, jewelry, and clothing. The romantic dinner also ranks among the most popular gift choices, which may be one of the reasons the average number of children conceived on Valentine’s Day reached 11,000. (1)
If your business is in any of the categories shown above, consider optimizing your account in early January. For some Valentine’s gifts—for example, beauty articles —online searches on the Yahoo Bing Network peaked last year in January. Restaurant searches spiked toward the end of January, when people made early reservations. Sweets and chocolates were most popular in early February, while women’s clothing and flowers reached their peak on Valentine’s Day. (3)
We’ve compiled some easy-to-implement optimization recommendations for small businesses. If you want professional help, please contact us at searchaz@microsoft.com to connect with one of our search experts.
Save time with Google imports
Many advertisers focus on their Google campaign first when they optimize for a special occasion like Valentine’s Day. Now you don’t have to do the work twice. Bing Ads made lets you easily import an entire account or specific campaigns directly from AdWords. Simply follow these steps.
Keyword list
Your keywords deserve some love as well. Now is a good time to add keywords for new products or services you offer. You may also pause or delete keywords that have not performed well in the past. For your convenience, we’ve collected a list of Valentine’s Day related terms and products.
Match type
As a best practice we recommend bidding on all match types (exact, phrase, and broad) for each keyword. The highest bid should go to exact, as you typically see better click-through rates and lower costs per click associated with exact match. Broad match captures more variations of a keyword but can lead to unwanted traffic. If you use broad match, try the broad match modifier. You do that by simply adding a plus sign to a term within your keyword string (example: Valentine’s Day +Flowers). Your ad will only appear if the word “flowers” was in the search phrase typed in.
Bidding & Budget
With additional traffic expected in the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, please check your daily or monthly budget settings. Avoid having your ads not show because of limited funding. Competition will heat up as Valentine’s Day approaches. Ads perform best when they’re on top of the search result list, so bidding competitively is always a good strategy. An easy way to calculate the right bid without overspending is either to follow the bid suggestions under the opportunities tab in Bing Ads or to install Bing Ads Intelligence, which offers rich data on any given keyword, including number and average costs per click and click-through rates by position and match type. Download it from the tools section of Bing Ads.
Ad copy
Speaking directly to the occasion can make your ad more appealing. “Romantic,” “unique,” “personalized,” or “hand-crafted” gifts not only make the recipient happy, they can get your ads noticed and clicked on.
Ad Extensions
1. Location
Displaying local information in your ad can help drive leads and bring more customers to your door. Address details and phone numbers remain the primary pieces of information consumers seek when they perform a local search. It’s easy to enable Location Extensions in Bing Ads. With a few quick steps, you can enter your business address and phone number and edit your campaign settings to display your location information.
2. Sitelinks
Sitelink Extensions are additional links in your ads that take searchers directly to specific pages on your website. You can enter up to 10 Sitelink Extensions for each campaign. These extensions apply to all ad groups and ads in your campaign.
- Statistic Brain: Valentine’s Day Statistics; 2/1/2012
- National Retail Federation: Americans To Pull Out All Stops This Valentine’s Day; 2/1/2012
3) Bing Ads internal data based on top 100 keywords in each category; 1/16-2/14 2012
Thank you!
Peter