As a Channel Partner with Microsoft Advertising, Wickfire has access to resources that allow the company to gain insight on search behaviour. “We integrated with the Bing Ads API, and we run data analysis on a lot of the information we pull to make sure we’re reaching as many consumers as we can,” Hall says. “We’ve also seen traffic segments we’re able to target on Bing that we can’t on other search platforms.”
Additionally, these partner resources enable Wickfire to quickly adapt to evolving consumer trends. For instance, the company saw changes to consumer behaviour in early 2020 as a result of COVID-19: a surge in searches for emergency food and disaster preparedness supplies, a spike in searches for products that people would typically buy in-store, and a shift to buying from e-commerce sites.
“Our team understood, probably earlier than most, how serious this was going to be because we saw those consumer trends playing out in real time as early as February and into March,” Hall says.
Wickfire will be taking the insights gleaned from those trends and applying them to its search marketing strategy this holiday season. The company will increase its search spend prior to Black Friday and sustain that throughout the holiday season, as well as manually bump its usual automated bidding to reach as many consumers as possible.
“Over the last few years, we’ve seen Cyber Monday outpace Black Friday,” says Hall. “This year, with people not wanting to go into crowded stores with long lines, we’ll see an even greater shift into the e-commerce world. We’re projecting that this will be a great holiday season for e-commerce.”