It can be pretty challenging to plan a PPC and know when to run specific Google Ad campaigns. As marketers, we know for a fact that users don’t always behave how we expect them to and if you think dividing your marketing budget equally over the 12 months can do any good, you are mistaken.
A lot of things are there to consider while marketing. Holidays, special events, and weather are just some of the few things which impact marketing activities. If planning PPC campaigns for clients, you must make sure to plan it seasonally, and clients don’t like wasting budget!
It is always best to plan ahead when it comes to your client’s budget. One of the tools that are apt for PPC planning is Google Trends. You want to know why?
This tool, with its abundance of data, makes it easy for marketers to plan and enhance PPC campaigns.
Here we will see what makes Google trends a great tool when it comes to planning for PPC campaigns as well as how it can be leveraged to get maximum results!
Importance of Trends
While planning PPC campaigns, seasonality plays a vital role. Your budget will get wasted if you have campaigns running 360 days of the year. Though Google Trends won’t show you the search volume for a particular keyword, it lets you view the user intent of a specific keyword over time. This will allow you to plan your PPC campaigns more effectively.
With many businesses advertising online and trends constantly changing, it is vital to stay ahead of the curve. With proper planning, your business can succeed!
Here are a few steps that will guide you through the process of using Google trends for planning your Google Ads.
Step 1- Getting Started
Let us look at the various steps that are required to take full advantage of the tool. Let us consider an e-commerce business selling men’s clothing and accessories. Firstly, you will need to decide on the country where we want to see user keyword interest. So, you will have to go ahead and choose the country before you start your search!
Step 2- Go More Granular With the Keywords
Simply searching for men’s clothing or apparels at the top category level won’t do any good. The best part about this tool is that you can go more granular with your search. It allows you to search sub-categories for the main category. If you are taking men’s clothing, you will find sub-categories that include t-shirts, jeans, casual shirts, and formal shirts.
Search interest is based on value ranging from 0 to 100. We will see people who are interested in different sub- categories from the data provided in Google trends. The level of interest for various categories will allow us to plan which campaigns might be considered “core” in your account compared to secondary and tertiary campaigns.
So, what does this tell us?
It tells us that keeping a big slice of the clients’ annual marketing budget can be utilized on sub-categories with higher volume and less budget on low volume ones.
Running paid activity during the peaks is a good practice as this is when users will most likely take action. As the peaks get lower, you can also run other forms of “soft” digital marketing campaigns like email and social.
Step 3- Related Queries
Looking at related queries will give you a much deeper understanding of related terms that are popular among users. In the case of men’s clothing, take the category of “casual shirts”, you will find that color is an essential variable in the related queries, such as “black” and “white”.
The information will allow us to create a separate campaign based on color with a specific landing page for “casual black shirts” to make the website more relevant to the user queries and eventually increasing conversion on site.
Step 4- Compare Using Data to Plan for PPC Budget
Google Trends lets you compare up to five keywords. You can choose the five that will drive most of the traffic and sales. After its done, you must plan to allocate the PPC monthly budget. Just above the Google trend graph, you will be able to download the data into a .csv sheet.
In the sheet, you will find the table that breaks down the value of interest (from 0-100) per week for each keyword. Modify the table to plan your PPC budget per month rather than per week. Start by adding a column for the month. Then, add up the totals of search interest across each keyword.
Next, you will have to create a pivot table that highlights the totals for each month. Make sure to edit the value field settings to “Average” rather than “Sum” as some months in the table will have four weeks of data while some will have five, and this might complicate the data.
After you have your pivot table, you must copy and paste the values from the table to another field and convert the level of interest into an index. Once the index of the values is created, you can apply the monthly budget across the 12 months. Create a “Monthly Budget” column right next to “Index” and add the total annual PPC budget in the “Total” row. The formula for calculating the monthly budget for each month= annual budget/12*monthly index.
Your final table will give you the PPC budget attributed to each month using the data provided by Google Trends. You will now know how much monthly budget you want to allocate.
Final Thoughts
Google Trends is a potent tool that many PPC managers should be taking advantage of more often. It will give you insight into how you need to plan your client’s budget. We live in a user-centric world, and so Google Trends allows us to put the user first when it comes to planning since we will get to see the level of user interest for each keyword.
Trends are regularly changing, so make sure you are ready to recalculate and redistribute budgets accordingly!
About the Author: Faiz Varghese is a social media marketer at TechWyse who is a knowledge craving techy. He loves to write quality content on the internet and has a passion for his job.