When PPC Goes Viral

A couple of weeks ago, I had to run a new Pay-per-Click campaign for one of our biggest clients, Madame Tussauds. The task consisted in bidding on keywords relating to a museum in Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum, in order to attract traffic to the Madame Tussauds Amsterdam website. The Rijksmuseum was set to do a grand re-opening after having been closed for ten years due to renovations, hence the decision to run the campaign at that point in time.

‘Now why on earth would you bid on keywords which have nothing to do with Madame Tussauds?’ I hear you ask? Capitalising on current news stories, or terms that have gone viral, can be an excellent technique to boost the performance of your PPC campaigns, simply because of the high search volume factor. Instead of starting with the campaign creation, based around all keywords directly related to your product/service, you start the other way round, by incorporating highly searched keywords which are, in some way or another, related to your product/service. As the buzz builds around those search terms, you are likely to capture a high volume of traffic to your site, and potentially make your business grow.

Celebrity names are a favourite for PPC use, especially if they become associated with a certain product, but be careful. You take huge risks of a. attracting a high level of irrelevant traffic, which may not result in any conversions, and b. lowering the Quality Score so much that it affects the performance of your campaign. Here are a few tips:

–          Use keywords which are related to your product/service somehow

–          Avoid keywords which are focused solely on the trend/news story/celebrity

–          Make reference to the trend/news story/celebrity in your ads (be careful when using trademarks and names)

–          Set your campaigns live quickly before the hype fizzles out

–          Check your search query data regularly and filter out all irrelevant terms by adding negative keywords

It is a gamble, yes, but as the saying goes: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Learn to keep an eye out for the best opportunities and jump swiftly on the bandwagon.

To find about more about using news stories in PPC:

http://www.ppchero.com/ppc-gone-viral-turn-a-big-news-story-into-ppc-success/

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