As we highlighted in the first of our Christmas blog series, Christmas and New Year are one of the busiest times in the dating calendar! With more people away from work and making New Year’s resolutions to kick-start their love lives, there is typically a huge spike in online dating searches and thus, traffic.
Historically, the uplift in traffic begins in December, continuing until January and the first week of February. You should be adjusting your campaigns between these periods.
It’s essential that you prepare your advertising campaigns in advance so that you can get the most out of the busy season. Here are some examples of the changes you need to make now:
Budgets
It’s good practice to increase your budget from December onwards to allow better coverage (visibility) across Google and other search engines. If your best campaigns are limited on budget, you’re missing out on potential traffic.
Bids
How you adjust your bids will vary depending on how you structure your campaigns, and what you are currently bidding.
Early December is a great time to further optimise your campaigns and ad-groups. Analyse what works and what doesn’t. For strong performing campaigns, increase your bids and pause campaigns that don’t deliver a good return. This will allow you to ensure you’re getting the best quality and highest possible quantity of traffic over the festive season.
Ads
As well as optimising your existing ads, this is a good time to create new festive ads that are appropriate for the time of year. Make references to Christmas and the New Year and incorporate seasonal calls to action. You should see a good increase to your click-through-rate.
Special Offers
Think about setting up a seasonal special offer to stay competitive and stand out from the crowd. This is a good opportunity to get immediate revenue and then reap the rewards from re-bills in the New Year.
Landing Page
Consider split testing your existing landing page against a more festive version, with Christmassy images and content. Having a tailored and relevant page will improve your Google Quality Score, both bringing your costs down and providing a slick user journey between your ad content and search terms and the site.
If you have any questions about festive optimisation, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Partner team.
Happy Holidays!
Alex Robertson, Partner Manager @ WhiteLabelDating.com