I spend a large amount of my day discussing online marketing strategies with clients and often people are looking for the right answer. You know the one that fits clearly on a multiple choice test and is the right answer. The challenge with marketing is there are no right or wrong answers, there are different answers. This causes a great level of frustration because we all want to look at data and clearly understand what it means and how we can leverage it. What many think of as marketing facts are really clues and the difference is important. It is a very rare situation where marketing data creates a clearly defined fact and this is because marketing is not simple.
Part of the complexity comes from factors that are outside the data set and one of those is the impact of entertainment or news media. Recently we had a client that had a product on Shark Tank that was closely associated with their business. The product pointed out a problem with home security and it caused the traffic on associated keywords to spike. While it was clearly outside of the data in Adwords, here is what the spike looked like in trends.
In this case, Shark Tank caused a search term to jump by over 400% and it opened a very real opportunity for an established company that had nothing to do with the show. Our reaction to this was to open new keywords and develop a landing page that served the demand created by the show.
In the past we have had several of these including a product mention by Oprah, which caused traffic to spike to several thousand percent in just a few minutes. This one we knew was coming so we watched it as it happened and the flood of traffic was just amazing to watch.
It’s not just entertainment and news, other outside factors can drive your results much more than the ad copy or keywords you pick. My favorite example of this is snow removal and no matter what we tried results for this client were horrible; that is until it snowed! Another client did basement waterproofing and I jokingly said during a strategy session that what we need is a really good rain storm. This happened a few days later and the client called me back told me to put his ads on hold because his business was booked solid for over 30 days and the phones just keep ringing.
AdWords search traffic serves demand but it cannot create demand. AdWords starts after the search is submitted so clearly it is not intended to create demand. If the task in front of you is to create demand then you need to consider image ads in the display network or other placement strategies.