Just a few days from the start of June, there’s no doubt that summer is here.

With the weather warmer, schools soon out and holidays booked, it’s sometimes easy to take the hand off the PPC tiller and let paid search campaigns wander lonely as clouds.

So we called on some PPC experts from all over the world to help keep your PPC goals on the straight and narrow with some ideas to think about while at the BBQ or sipping that cool glass of Pimms.

Take heed of a couple of these tips and you’ll be sure to make lots of hay while the sun shines:

Jon Myers - Head of Search at MediaVest

Keywords and creative changes go without saying but two areas that need to be considered are:

Tip 1 - Make sure you reformat your PPC landing pages to have a summer appeal, regardless of if you’re in finance, travel and retail, a summer feel seems to improve conversion especially if you pitch it as summer offers and it feel like a limited time offer.

Tip 2 - People search at different times in the summer months so think about changing your normal day parting strategy, with it being light till 10pm compared to 4pm in winter, make sure you are taking into account the weather forecasts as if you have sunny nights and weekends consider pushing you budget harder at other times of the day, it can have a big effect. If it is a nice day less people are online generally!

Dixon Jones – MD at Receptional.com

In the summer, particularly during the school holidays, the search patterns on many terms vary wildly, so so not expect your spend and ROI to be the same over those months. Some terms soar and others sink. You can use Microsoft's tools to not only see relative search terms in the past, but more importantly use them to predict the volumes over the coming months. This is potentially very useful in moderating you campaign for the holidays.

Bas van den Beld – State of Search

My tip is about the World Cup this summer. The tip goes in two directions, when and what: First make sure you check at what time the World Cup games are on this summer and place your ads at the right moments: nobody will be looking during the match, then again many will be looking after the matches.

Second also remember also that people might be searching after the match for match commentary, videos etcetera but also for a commercial they might have seen at half time, so be sure to adjust your ad based on what happened during, at half time and after the match.

Kate Morris - SEO Consultant - Distilled Consulting

When doing geographically targeted ads, remember that if you have some in the southern hemisphere, they are not in summer during June, July and August. So don't show your "Cool off with our hot bikinis" to the Kiwis right now. Keep the intent and frame of mind of the searcher you are targeting in mind when writing ads. And never copy/paste when geographically targeting anything. The best ads are written for the specific searcher.

And remember in Microsoft adCenter, you can set geographic targeting by ad group too, not just campaign. Use this to ensure that your new "Hot Summer Savings" ads are focused to the right places and the right consumers.

Matt Van Wagner – Find Me Faster

1 - Subtly tweak ad copy to tap into the vacation psyche using words like relax, enjoy, have fun. Emphasize saving time & convenience messages.

2 - Set up adCenter alerts to notify you only if campaign performance is way off the rail.   Don’t login everyday.  You need a vacation, too.

Dave Naylor MD of Bronco

A game changer for me is the way you can target men or women and target them anytime of the day. So to all the landlords out there, as the world cup is nigh, why not target women with the title “sick of your man watching the world cup” and target men on team names, latest scores, letting them know where they can watch the big match in their local pub.

Joanna Lord - Director of Customer Acquisition at SEOmoz

After you have considered the current seasonal factors its important to look ahead. Too often PPC advertiser's focus so much energy trying to capitalize on summer specific terms they forget to glance forward to the "back to school" season--which for some can be a real conversion driver. I suggest taking the time during the summer months to data mine your Analytics (or internal log files) from last summer and see which keywords started to gain momentum as the summer days started to roll into the fall.

Make sure to have those "back to school" landing pages ready to roll out, and capitalize on conversions while others are late to the game!

Andy Atkins-Kruger – MD of WebCertain

Don't assume you need to turn down your PPC during August in Mediterranean countries – France and Spain for instance - just because you think they're all at the beach! PPC costs often go down because fewer people are bidding but equally conversion can be poor. But the people who ARE searching at that point are generally more senior - and conversions take place after August when they're less obviously picked up in tracking tools. So you reach more senior people more cheaply - but can't track it until their delegates are back at their desk.

It's counter-intuitive but common sense when you think about it – unless you’re over-using automated bidding in which case watch out!

New Addition 27/5 - David Szetela from Clixmarketing

Many PPC advertisers use the dayparting feature of Google AdWords – turning off ad display during the hours of the day when they believe customers aren’t buying. But they do so based on their own intuition, since the AdWords time-of-day report is unable to show conversion data.

So it’s likely that many advertisers are guessing incorrectly, and losing out on conversions as a result.

Enter Microsoft adCenter, which does allow advertisers to see conversion data in time-of-day reports. Smart PPC managers run campaigns in adCenter, and base their dayparting decisions for all ad platforms on the data that only Microsoft reveals!

Thanks to all our industry friends for helping us help you.

Cheers

Mel

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