What To Do With Your Paid Ads During COVID-19

In these challenging times and as we are all in this together, I wanted to share some of my tips on how to manage and push your eCommerce pay-per-click advertising campaigns and paid social campaigns during this difficult period.

These tips apply to paid online advertising such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads – but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch below!

We’ve all seen buying behaviour take a huge shift since social distancing measures have been put in place in the UK; we are seeing the older generations changing their views and doing their food shops online, and social media usage has shot up with people keeping in touch and documenting their days online. This opens up many opportunities for eCommerce businesses that can still remain open and fulfil orders.

With some of the PPC clients I look after, some accounts are performing really well – one, in particular, is performing the best I’ve seen it in two years in terms of revenue and return on ad spend. So it’s definitely not doom and gloom for some of us marketers, it really isn’t! We just need to adjust and re-strategise.

With all that being said, I’ve collated my top 5 tips for PPC & Paid Social Management during COVID-19 for you below.

If you need some support with your campaigns, please contact me for a FREE audit, a full advertising audit and help re-strategising your ads by clicking here to email me directly!

Don’t Panic And Pause Your Campaigns

If your competitors have paused campaigns or have been left with no choice but to temporarily close, this could give you an opportunity to fill this gap and perform better in auction. Amazon, who in the last year has been a lot more aggressive with their PPC, have dropped off the auction completely from mid-March which opens a huge opportunity for businesses that didn’t have the budget to compete i.e. one of my client’s impression share has increased by 147% from the impact of this, even with slightly lowered budgets! I’ve noticed that eBay has started to jump on this opportunity already and is already bidding a lot more aggressively – so don’t wait!

Change Your Ad Copy

Many companies haven’t changed their ad copy and ad extensions which adds some uncertainty to potential buyers who are unsure if they are still open. Make sure your ads stand out and solve people’s problems – I’ve rewritten so many ads over this time period with messages such as ‘We Are Still Open’ and ‘No Contact Deliveries’ to make our ads stand out against competitors.

Understand How People Are Searching

Analyse Google Search Console and understand how people are finding your site and what people are searching for at the moment using date filters. Also, dig into Google Analytics – what’s selling well and are you showing these on your Ads? If not, why not? Another great tool is Google Trends which is great for understanding what people are buying at the moment, again here you can search in the UK with date filters and various search terms.

Source: Google Trends – showing an increase in searches for freezers vs washing machines between 02/03 – 04/04/2020 in the UK.

Monitor Performance Closely

Manipulate your data, compare day-to-day, week-on-week, year-on-year to get a true understanding of your current ads performance. Select the metrics that are most important to you and compare these. Yes, sales may have dropped, but if your return on ad spend is better and you have a higher impression share, those are really positive wins and a reason to continue showing ads!

Strongly Consider Social Media Advertising

The increase in the use of social media is massive and this opens up a huge opportunity for both B2C and B2B eCommerce brands right now. Whatever your budget, this could be a great way of getting some additional sales through a new platform through either remarketing to those who have visited your site but not purchased or reaching new customers through the comprehensive targeting options.

Additional Helpful Resources

• Ad Credits from Google & Facebook:
  Google and Facebook are offering Ad Credits for Small and Medium sized businesses in the coming months. You might be eligible for these, so here’s some further information directly from Google and Facebook.
  
• Google response to Covid-19:
  The world’s most popular search engine has made a company announcement relating to Coronavirus which you can read here.
• Facebook Business Resource Hub:
  There are a range of fantastic resources available here through Facebook to help you manage your business through the lockdown.
• Managing Your Product Inventory:
  Help shoppers find exactly what they need with these handy tips from the Google Merchant Centre team.