This post originally appeared on my linkedIn profile here in April 2020
A spike in “work from home jobs” searches was a trend we noticed in March that sums up the changing reality we have all experienced as the virus spread around the world. We will share the winners and losers of the lockdown and offer suggestions at how you might take advantage of shifts in consumer behaviour.
Fortunately we have a diverse client base and can offer as much good news as bad.
Let’s start with the bad (and obvious) – Travel. Activity here has fallen off a cliff. Unfortunately our clients have had to cease spending and face a very tough next few months. It will be interesting to see the impact at the aggregate level when Google announces its quarterly results early next month.
Fortunately, there is plenty of good (acknowledging I speak for those of us lucky enough to keep jobs and a roof over our heads). Being forced to stay at home, it seems a lot of us have decided that making the most of things means getting busy in the kitchen or garden.
Here is the trend of impressions (essentially search volume), clicks to site, conversions (sales) and ad costs for our Home & Garden and Grocery clients.
The chart shows that during the initial stages of social distancing measures search behaviour did not alter much. Perhaps we were all still too shocked? However after the initial weeks and perhaps the realisation that we had better get used to it and settle in, search activity for these categories has taken off reaching 2 and 3X what they were in February. Just as importantly conversions followed the searches, at a constant and sometimes better return on investment.
Recommendations to improve your Google Search Ads results
Manage activity by ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) not fixed monthly budgets
Paid search (or SEM) is largely a demand fulfilment channel. That is, you are targeting people already looking for what you sell. It should be viewed more as a variable cost of sale expense as opposed to marketing or advertising.
You don’t set a budget for credit card fees or receipt toner (in fact you’d love to see these double as it means sales will have doubled also…) So why stop your Adwords spend because of an arbitrary monthly budget if it is continuing to deliver an acceptable return?
A couple of our Home & Garden clients did the hard work to set their business and accounts up this way. They have reaped the rewards with sales up over 70% in late March and April vs February. Even better is that we hardly had to touch anything in the account to capture this spike in demand. Google’s auto bidding algorithms simply responded to the increased number of searches.
For some clients this has been the equivalent of getting two Christmases in a year. Given current trends it could turn out to be three!
Have the right alignment with your agency
The best results have been achieved for clients where we have been treated as a true partner. These are the clients that trusted us with sensitive business information (margin, profitability etc), and empowered us to make most of the day to day decisions on their behalf, knowing we were always working towards what really mattered.
Knowing where the juice is for clients allowed us to overlay our knowledge to design their campaigns to best extract the most from situations like COVID-19.
For example, is your agency allowed to double spend over a month without needing various levels of sign off? We are. Often that could take weeks, completely missing the opportunity. Another is bringing ideas proactively (such as new ad copy) to the client while they focused on more pressing issues like the changes they needed to make inside their business to keep staff and customers safe.
Ask yourself which of the two diagrams best represents your relationship? Opportunities abound over the next few months in sectors much broader than we have highlighted here.
