How to optimize campaigns to cut losses and not lose customers.

How to keep your ads profitable

When Internet traffic drops on most topics, and businesses suffer losses, it is important not to panic and quickly adapt to the situation. To compensate for the downturn and cut losses, PPC advertising also needs a kind of quarantine. Let’s find out how to provide it so as not to lose existing customers or find new ones.

1. Check trends

Western marketers have faced COVID-19 outbreaks and self-isolation before us. They have already assessed the first impact of the epidemic on the effectiveness of online advertising.

Summarizing their observations, we can distinguish three groups of topics, more and less prone to decline:

High risk: tourism, travel, offline entertainment, tickets to events, bars and restaurants, exhibitions and conferences, sports and fitness, construction, unproductive retail, clothing.

Medium risk: real estate, renovations, furniture, cars, jobs and education, media, oil and gas, industry, agriculture, beverages.

Low risk: charities and NGOs, medicine and pharmaceuticals, packaging, waste recycling, financial services, business services, telecom, health and beauty, online entertainment, flowers, and gifts.

The following materials will tell you more about the latest trends:

Coronavirus and contextual advertising: dynamics of key metrics, forecast for the future and recommendations

The global impact of the coronavirus on internet traffic

Getting an industry into a high-risk group is not yet a reason to completely abandon advertising. It just means that your campaigns need a bigger change. If you want not to lose customers – read the tips below.

2. Reduce mobile impressions

With the onset of the epidemic, the share of smartphones and tablets in total search traffic has been declining. Obviously, this is due to the fact that most of the time at home people spend on the laptop screen.

3. Find ‘negative’ keywords

Coronavirus and quarantine dominate the minds of most users. Relevant queries are increasingly appearing in a variety of topics, even the most unexpected ones.

Regularly check the reports on inquiries in advertising offices.

As soon as you find impressions for phrases that are not directly related to your offer, add them to your list of negative keywords.

You can find these words even before they start to drain budgets. Check the top keywords in Google Trends.

Pay for conversions

In most cases, it is wise to switch to the “Conversion Optimization” strategy in the “Target Cost Per Conversion” in Google Ads. For applications, these will be “Install Optimization” and “Target Cost Per Install”, respectively.

They no longer require accumulated conversion data, and can start right away. Strategies may be less effective than expected at first, but the algorithm needs time to learn.

Don’t forget to cap your maximum CPC. Due to the slowdown in traffic and changes in user behavior, bid fluctuations may be greater than usual. Make sure not to pay for site visits at a loss.

5. Rewrite ads

The main thing that advertising should show during quarantine is sensitivity and care for customers. It is necessary to talk about unscheduled promotions, but you should not bring them to the fore.

Businesses now find it difficult to stay afloat, employees find it difficult to stay productive at home, schoolchildren and students to cope with their studies without the support of teachers, etc. Think about how your proposal will make their life easier, and make it your temporary USP.

6. Disable expensive ads

Audit all levels of your ad account, from campaigns to ads. Your goal is to find the items that cost you the most. To do this, you need to sort the tables of each level according to the selected metric (cost of conversion or ROI).

Determine the maximum price you’re willing to pay for a customer and pause campaigns, ad groups, and ads where it was exceeded. If you are calculating profitability, you can choose it as a KPI.

Before you pause a campaign with a high CPA or low ROI, check how the metrics are added. Probably, they are spoiled by one ad group, the disabling of which will be limited to. Then analyze the composition of the remaining campaigns. They may also contain ineffective groups, after stopping which advertising will become more profitable.

7. Go online

Quarantined search engines are used less often, but overall Internet traffic, on the contrary, is growing. In just a few days after people switched to remote work, its volume increased by 20-30%.

Therefore, it makes sense to shift the priority from search to other placements:

• KMS Google

• Youtube

They cover most of the sites that people spend their time on. Now is also a good time to test video ads. ISPs are seeing the influx of users to online cinemas and movie and TV series resources.