Partners Blog
What's new @ Google? Tips and tools for agencies
Catching the eye with seasonal ads
Monday, December 3, 2018
Reading time: 4 minutes
Seasonal campaigns go beyond the holidays - Cyber Monday, Mother’s Day, and Small Business Saturday are also a huge part of the retail year. They’re less about targeting seasons, and more about finding moments with a common appeal in your client’s industry.
Brands need to be present in these moments, ready to greet panic-driven deal hunters with the perfect solution. So we sat down with Shopify’s CMO Hana Abaza on the
Google Partners Podcast
to get her top tips for seasonal campaigns that drive sales.
Find your season
Every business has an element of seasonality; times when interest piques and traffic spikes. All you need to do is identify them! Robust
Google Analytics
reports are a great place to start. Export your data onto a spreadsheet, and with some clever formatting, trends will start to light up like fireworks on New Year's Eve.
Analytics also helps you uncover biases that may be hiding behind “failed” campaigns. For example, if you pumped a lot of your budget into targeting Valentine’s Day last year without success, it would be easy to write the day off as a ‘bad fit’ for your brand. Take a fresh look at the data, carry out an honest review, and you may find that small tweaks are all that’s needed to turn things around next year.
Spot your opportunity
You’ve identified the seasons that matter to your business, now make sure your marketing budget is ready to handle the increased workload. Use
Google Trends
to spot search trends across each region you’re targeting, then compare that to search volume data in Google Ads to find keywords that fit your offering.
In the build-up of individual events,
Consumer Barometer
can help you better understand how to reach your audience at the right time, with the right message. Different events bring up different emotions, so keeping track of consumer trends is a great way to make sure your ads strike an emotional chord with your audience.
Create separate campaigns
It’s important that you measure success without the noise of other, non-seasonal campaigns. This helps you identify nuances in each season, and optimize next year’s campaigns with those insights in mind.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with copy. Products like
Responsive Search Ads
(RSAs) can help you test different messages with very little effort. All you need to do is enter multiple headlines and descriptions about your products, and
Google Ads
will test different combinations to identify the best fit for your audience.
Don’t miss last-minute shoppers
There’s been a 120% increase in “same-day delivery” searches since 2015
1
. For urgent searches, 74% of shoppers say that when they’re searching on mobile, they look for the most relevant information, regardless of the company or brand
2
. As a result, the retailer that provides the most seamless experience wins.
Season-specific
promotion extensions
help your ads stand out on Google’s results pages, and spotlight special promotions you may be running for the event. Highlighting services like same-day delivery, last-minute sales, or gift-wrapping may be all it takes to tip customers in your direction.
Great seasonal campaigns are all about planning. Arm yourself with industry trends, plan your marketing budget with those trends in mind, and remember to tap into your consumer’s emotions with ads that resonate. With the right tools, a detailed content plan, and thorough research, you’ll be setting yourself up for seasonal success.
Watch the video below and tune in to the
Google Partners Podcast
for more actionable tips and insights for seasonal success.
1
How to reach today’s impatient shoppers - whether they’re shopping online, by voice, or in store
, Think With Google, May 2018
2
How to reach today’s impatient shoppers - whether they’re shopping online, by voice, or in store
, Think With Google, May 2018
Digital marketing made (much) easier: Introducing Google Tag Manager
Monday, October 1, 2012
Over the past few years, we’ve seen massive improvements in digital marketing sophistication and capabilities. Today there’s a rich suite of tools allowing marketers to gain better insights, reach audiences in new ways, and develop improved marketing campaigns so users have better web experiences. Yet many modern marketing tools—like web analytics, conversion tracking, remarketing, and more—depend on adding "tags" to your website.
Website tags help enable today’s sophisticated digital marketing technologies
Tags are tiny bits of website code can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges. Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions.
We’ve been hard at work to
help take the pain out of tagging for everyone.
That’s why today, we’re announcing our first release of
Google Tag Manager
. We’re launching globally in English, and the product will soon be available in many other languages.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that consolidates your website tags with a single snippet of code and lets you manage everything from a web interface. You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code. It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks. Take a quick look at how easy it is to set up an account and manage your tags:
Google Tag Manager is built to handle your tagging needs, and it works with Google and non-Google website tags. We’ve packed in lots of great
features
, including:
Asynchronous tag loading
—so your tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page
Easy-to-use
tag templates
, so marketers can quickly add tags with our web interface, as well as support for
custom tags
Error-prevention tools like
Preview mode
(so you can see proposed changes before implementing them), the
Debug Console
, and
Version History
to ensure that new tags won’t break your site
User permissions
and
multi-account
functionality to make it easy for large teams and agencies and clients to work together with appropriate levels of access
Plus we have exciting plans to add great new features over the next several months
We’re also happy to announce our tag vendor program: If your company provides tag technology and you’d like Google Tag Manager to include a template for your tag, please
contact us here
to become a tag vendor.
Dozens of companies have already begun using Google Tag Manager and have seen great results. Ameet Arurkar, Director of Search Engine Marketing at
QuinStreet
, reports:
“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process. What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day—sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves.”
“Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”
Setting up Google Tag Manager is quick and easy—you create an account, add one snippet of code to your site, then start managing tags. If you want more help, contact a
Google Certified Partner
—they’ve been carefully vetted and meet rigorous qualification standards.
Get started today at
www.google.com/tagmanager
.
Posted by Laura Holmes, Product Manager, Google Tag Manager
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