When is the best time to sell heaters? How about lawn mowers?  It is a company’s business to know when their seasons begin and end. For example: toy companies do their main advertising from mid-October through December and air conditioning companies do their main advertising from mid-May through October.  Seasons also apply to the world of paid search. Therefore it is important for companies to know their paid search seasons and adjust their online strategies accordingly.

It is always valuable for a business to have a paid search presence. However, it is vital to know when to slow down or throttle up paid search advertising. The main time to throttle up paid search spending is right before the busy season. Each client knows that their sales/leads tend to spike and maintain a high during certain parts of the year. Once a business has defined their busy season, they need to translate this knowledge to their paid search efforts. On the same note, when the busy season ends, it’s good to slow down the paid search spend, so that a wealth of funds can be used for your busy season. For example: Company A sells insurance, and May thru September is their busy season. For the months of April thru September they spend $10,000 a month. They ramp up in April for the surge that will start to take place in May. When Company A slows down in October, they lower their budget to $7,000 and maintain that monthly budget through the end of March. They are spending 30% more during their busy season and still maintaining a presence during the slower months.

Once a business understands their paid search seasons, they can make the necessary changes to their advertising budget.  By making these adjustments, a business is able to make the most of their paid search efforts. For some businesses, the paid search seasons can become a little more complex, which will be discussed in Part 2. 

Still not convinced that you need to specifically target mobile and/or tablet devices in your AdWords campaigns? I would recommend that you run a Device Segmented report – under “Segment” click ‘Device’:

Your campaign performance data will be broken out by Computers, Mobile devices with full browsers and Tablets with full browsers like the screen shot below.

As you can see from the screen shot above, the average cost-per-click (CPC) for both mobile devices and tablets is considerably lower than the average CPC of a computer. By specifically creating campaigns for mobile and tablet devices, you will be able to lower your CPC bids for these campaigns, thus ultimately lowering your cost per conversion and advertising spend.

So now that you are ready to specifically target mobile devices and tablets, you will want to look at the Devices in your Settings tab. Make sure that your new campaign is only targeting mobile, and also note that you will want to remove Mobile devices as a selection from your Computers campaign. You can also target mobile devices based on their operating system.

For more information on mobile campaigns, click here. Happy segmenting!

During this holiday shopping season, consumers are consulting mobile devices for holiday shopping more than ever before, according to eMarketer. Smartphones are quickly becoming on-the-go shopping assistants, a la iPhone’s Siri.

Shoppers are using mobile devices for product research, online shopping and help in making purchase decisions while in brick-and-mortar stores. In addition, certain product categories like books, CDs and DVDs, video games, clothing and electronics drive more smartphone usage than others.

This time of year, it is important to be in the consumers’ eyes, especially if you have an e-commerce web site. One easy way to become visible to the mobile customer and get quick results is to segment your pay per click (PPC) traffic to specifically target mobile devices. One important item to note is that you do not have to have a mobile website in order use mobile targeting.

You can simply target mobile devices in the Settings tab of each PPC campaign that you create. Also note that you should exclude mobile devices from your desktop campaigns in order to avoid your campaigns from competing against one another.

According to Google, the average mobile cost-per-click (CPC) is approximately $0.05 to $0.10 cheaper than its counterpart desktop CPC, so not only will your ad be visible to mobile visitors, but you will also be paying less for these visitors.