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Helping small businesses win hearts for Valentine’s Day

Valentine's Day is a dream holiday for small businesses ranging from restaurants to boutiques to florists as shoppers search for unique gifts and experiences to show their loved ones how special they are. Local searches on the Bing Network are growing. With a 9 percent increase in local searches year over year — amounting to 88 million local searches monthly — and a 3 percent increase in paid local clicks,1 Bing Ads is ready to help your small business become the local favorite. 

Be the favorite restaurant
Valentine’s Day is the second-busiest day for restaurants in America with 34 percent of people going out to eat.2 American comfort food restaurants, steakhouses and seafood restaurants were the most searched restaurant types in February 2016.3 Compete with chain restaurants by bidding on your own brand terms and against your competitors’ brands to reach high-intent searchers. Here were the top search terms by city:4

Los Angeles:
  1. Seafood restaurants
  2. Denny’s
  3. Breakfast restaurants
  4. Steakhouse
  5. Chili’s
 
 
  1. Pappadeaux
  2. Chili’s
  3. Pappasito’s
  4. Denny’s
  5. Perry’s Steakhouse
New York:
  1. Applebee’s
  2. TGI Fridays
  3. Chili’s
  4. Capital Grille
  5. Kona Grille
 
  1. Chili’s
  2. Applebee’s
  3. Denny’s
  4. Texas de Brazil
  5. Seafood restaurants
 
The top restaurant search terms varied by different regions, making local audience targeting crucial for restaurant ads. Target local audiences by modifying audiences down to city, Zip Code or radius. You can also choose to include explicit location intent in a query (i.e., “Seattle Restaurants”).
Tip: Time your ads for weekends when restaurant searches and clicks peak. Searches and clicks first peak from January 6 to January 14, which suggests that restaurant plans are researched and reserved at least one month in advance of February 14. Also, make sure to be there at the last minute when searches rise the last three days before Valentine’s Day.5
Make it easy for customers to find your restaurant with Location Extensions.  A click on the directions link will bring up Bing Maps or Yahoo Maps on a PC, tablet or smartphone and automatically populate the destination into the map directions. On a smartphone, the click will also automatically populate the origin and calculate the route. The click-through rate increases 10 to 30 percent for mobile ads using Location Extensions.6

Be the favorite indie brand
Unbranded searches present opportunities for small businesses. Searchers are more likely to be brand-agnostic and open to trying less widely known brands. In fact, Etsy was the top PC/tablet search for Valentine’s Day in 2016, and it was on the top 10 list of search terms on mobile.7Target mobile audiences and bid on trending keywords for mobile searches. The top six mobile searches for Valentine’s Day were unbranded. Unbranded searches were prominent in four product categories for Valentine’s Day:8
  • 6 of the top 10 jewelry search terms were unbranded.
  • 9 of the top 10 food search terms were unbranded.
  • All the top 10 flower arrangement search terms were unbranded.
  • 9 of the top 10 toy search terms were unbranded (i.e., teddy bears).
When you have great ratings, tell your customers about it. Earn trust with Review Extensions.  Nearly half of internet users said they always, or at least most of the time, check online reviews before making a purchase.9 With Review Extensions in your ads, you can display a positive review, award or ranking by an independent, respected third-party source. 

Be the favorite jeweler
Jewelry generates the second-largest revenue during the Valentine’s Day shopping season; $4.5 billion was spent for Valentine’s Day 2016.10 Also about 50 percent of marriage proposals happen on Valentine’s Day,11 so shoppers will be searching for engagement rings. Optimize mobile search campaigns for well-kept surprises like jewelry and engagement rings. The top mobile search term during the Valentine’s Day shopping season in 2016 was “jewelry.”12 “Engagement rings,” “earrings,” and “necklace” were also part of the top 10 Valentine’s Day mobile search terms.13 Jewelers should bid on these keywords:14
 



Did you know what that the Bing Network audience is an effective marketplace for jewelry? Compared with Google, the Bing Network audience is 8 percent more likely to have spent $200-$499 on jewelry or accessories in the last six months.15
Provide excellent customer service and compete with big jewelers that provide click-to-call customer service with Call Extensions. Call Extensions help increase the click-through rate by 15 to 25 percent for mobile ads.16 Call Extensions help your ads stand out on the page, giving customers a convenient way to call your business directly from search results — one click to call you is all it takes.  

Be the favorite florist
Expand your flower shop beyond the block, and bring shoppers closer to a purchase decision with Product Ads and Bing Shopping Campaigns. Product Ads make your retail ads pop on the search results page. Your ads will showcase your products in a larger format with images, text, pricing and your company name. When Michael Sabia, vice president of marketing at From You Flowers, joined the company, Bing Ads was “a very small piece of the pie.” That changed with Bing Shopping Campaigns and Sitelink Extensions. Orders from Bing Ads grew 603 percent from 2011 to 2015, and Valentine’s Day orders grew 90 percent from 2015 to 2016.17 It also helps that the Bing Network audience is 11 percent more likely than Google to have spent $100-$199 on flowers (online or offline) in the last six months.18



View our Bing Ads Valentine’s Day 2017 eBook now for highlights on Valentine’s Day search strategies, or visit our Valentine’s Day insights page to view the full Valentine’s Day presentation.  To access our entire library of seasonal and vertical insights, visit the Bing Ads Insights portal.
 
 
[1] comScore qSearch (custom), U.S., March 2016; industry categories based on comScore classifications, comparing March 2016 to March 2015.
[2] Eater, What America Eats on Valentine’s Day, 2016.
[3] Microsoft internal data, daily searches by geo location, Jan-Feb 2016, U.S. only.
[4] Microsoft internal data, daily searches by geo location, Jan-Feb 2016, U.S. only.
[5] Microsoft internal data, daily searches Jan-Feb 2016, U.S. only.
[6] Bing Network Internal data, Q1 2013 to Q1 2014; Marin Software, “Mobile Search Advertising Around the Globe: 2014 Annual Report;” Microsoft internal data, 2014.
[7] Microsoft internal data, daily searches Jan-Feb 2016, U.S. only.
[8] Microsoft internal data, daily searches Jan-Feb 2016, U.S. only.
[9] AYTM Market Research as citied in company blog, July 8, 2016.
[10] National Retail Federation, Monthly Consumer Survey, February 2016.
[11] Fatwallet, Two Dozen Valentine’s Spending Facts, 2016.
[12] Microsoft internal data, daily mobile search, 2016, U.S. only.
[13] Microsoft internal data, daily searches, 2016, U.S. only.
[14] Microsoft internal data, daily searches, 2016, U.S. only.
[15] comScore Plan Metrix, U.S., January 2016, custom measure created using comScore indices and duplication.
[16] BIA/Kelsey, Call-Based Ads: Eliminating the Unknown from Advertising, May 2012.
[17] Microsoft, “From You Flowers: mandatory growth, mandatory fun,” 2016.
[18] comScore Plan Metrix, U.S., January 2016, custom measure created using comScore indices and duplication.  January was used to reflect the month prior to Valentine’s Day.