Seasonal Business Questions

[soona99]

I have a Christmas related seasonal business which does well from Thanksgiving week until Christmas. My question is should I pay the high price now for first page listings on adwords to establish (1) a solid high click through rate even though my conversions will suck until the day after Thanksgiving? This would hopefully drive down my cpc for my busiest time Thanksgiving-Christmas.

Or should I wait until the day after Thanksgiving when I know people are ready to buy, then jump in full force and run ads against the big guys? Of course everybody will be running ads then so there's really no telling what first page listings will run.

[buckworks]

My advice would be to run the ads now at moderate bids, enough to get some exposure but not necessarily on the first page. Use the time running in "low gear" to improve your CTR by fine-tuning your campaigns, ads and keywords (and placements if you'll be running ads on the content network).

The AdWords' algo's CTR evaluations are tempered by the rank your ads are appearing. The algo knows that ads running at a lower rank will normally get a lower CTR, but if your ad is doing better than expected the system will recognize good performance even if you're not bidding aggressively yet.

When running at a low rank it can take longer to establish that your ad's CTR is better than the competition, but if it's still a few weeks until your busy season hits, spending some time might save you some money.

[soona99]

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'll try your suggestion.

[LucidSW]

My answer is basically the same as Buckworks. Use this time before the event to optimize your ad. Get that click rate and QS up. If you can get the QS to 10, you are then in the driver seat. You won't have to increase your bid as much to get the top positions. You'll be the leader, not the follower, although surely others have ads already up and running.