IMMania.com

Recently, I created an Excel spreadsheet of every PPC campaign I had run over the past year. This was an exercise to separate out the winners from the losers and also an attempt to figure out why they won or lost. But it was also a way for me to put time period boundaries on each campaign and use that as a reminder for when I needed to gear up for each campaign.

Of course, like most marketers I suppose, the bulk of my campaigns, both profitable and unprofitable, are run during the holiday period — from 10/31 to 12/20 or so. However, for certain niches there were also seasonal peaks at the beginning of the year, early spring, early summer, there’s back to school, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, well…you get the picture.

Before getting into IM, I along with most other people, would scoff at how early the Christmas holiday advertising would seem to start each year. Now I’ve joined the “other side”. I’m already planning my holiday campaigns and it’s the first of August.

It’s already too late for Back To School and all those Halloween campaigns should be in place by now.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s well worth the time and effort to list out the seasonal peaks for each market you’re in and take stock of any seasonal campaigns you’ve run in the past.

Were they profitable?

If so, then what can you do the next time around to make them even more profitable?

But more importantly, take a hard look at your losers and marginal seasonal campaigns. Why did they just lay there and lay an egg? In many cases, I had campaigns for products that got a fair amount of sales, but in the end either just broke even or lost money. In every case it was because the price point of the product was not high enough to overcome what Google was asking as the min. bid price for those campaign keywords.

Lesson Learned: I try to not promote products or services using PPC advertising that have an average commission below $20. Some set this threshold lower at $10, but I’m not that good with Adwords yet to exist on those kinds of margins.

And don’t be so quick to completely throw out your losers! Especially the ones that had brisk sales. Try free types of traffic generation instead of PPC like article and forum marketing for example.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!