If you haven't already read and heeded Justin Vanning's advice on optimizing your campaigns for Valentine's Day, or Philip Ryan's tips for dating-related advertisers, there's still some time left to capture Valentine's Day traffic for  your SEM campaigns. 

To catch you up to speed, here's a quick list of steps that should have been taken in January to prepare your gift and getaway-related PPC campaigns for Valentine's Day:

• Audit your current keyword list for gaps
• Develop and launch your Valentine's Day-specific creative messaging and keyword lists
• Adjust your bidding strategy to build and maintain solid performance history
• Incorporate demographic targeting (incremental bidding) to capture your most valuable audiences
• Optimize general and branded keyword performance

If you haven't taken any of these steps, there's still time left to capitalize on the seasonal spike in traffic from Valentine's Day gift seekers, as evinced by the graph below:

Your best bet for getting ramped up quickly and efficiently is to create a campaign specifically for Valentine's Day so you don't have to spend valuable time making changes to your existing campaigns.  Creating holiday-specific campaigns are a quick and effective way to manage your budget and reporting during seasonal spikes, not to mention the added convenience of being able to switch them on as the holiday approaches and pause them once the holiday has passed. If you create a Valentine's Day campaign this year, next  year you'll just need to do a quick review of your reports from this year to determine whatever adjustments you'd like to make to improve performance. 

To get you started, you can download this list of Valentine's Day related keywords for use in your campaign.

IMPORTANT: Be sure to remove any terms from this list that are not relevant to your campaign before uploading; this list is fairly extensive and covers multiple products/services -- it is not suitable for "as is".  Also be sure to adjust any generic terms to make them more relevant to your web site's landing pages to ensure a seamless editorial review.

Additionally, you may find the below graphs helpful, both in terms of what kind of click-through rate (CTR) you should strive for on your ad performance reports...

... and determining your bidding strategy (keep in mind the below are averages - competitive, aggressive bids are recommended for top positioning):

On average, the amount most people intend to spend on Valentine's Day is $122 ($156 by men, $90 by women) with the largest spend planned by18-34 year olds at an average of $162.  If you plan to target by age and/or gender with incremental bidding, this information may help guide your percentage decisions to help you get the most bang for your CPC buck.

Do you have any tips, tricks or strategies that have worked for your previous Valentine's Day campaigns?  We'd love to hear about them -- please feel free to add your comments below or stop by the forums.

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